What's new in Butler - May 12, 2026
✨ Home page redesign
**New greeting style.** The home greeting now uses a warm italic serif font (Newsreader) for a more refined, personal feel. **Inline task creation.** The floating "New task" button has been replaced with a text input bar at the bottom of the screen. Type what you need and hit enter - Butler creates the task and takes you straight into it. No extra steps. **Quick-start chips.** Suggestion chips for common tasks (reminders, email, research, phone calls) appear above the input bar for one-tap access to templates. **Better status indicators.** Tasks needing your attention now show a glowing amber dot next to the count for faster scanning.
🔧 Browser tasks no longer falsely report failure
**Async browser agent.** Browser tasks (Instacart, restaurant bookings, etc.) no longer time out on long runs. Butler now starts the browser agent in the background and checks on it every 15 seconds instead of waiting in one long blocking call. Previously, tasks over 5 minutes would report "I wasn't able to complete" even when the agent actually succeeded.
👤 Admin panel shows user emails
**Reach out to users.** The admin panel now shows each user's email address (fetched from Clerk) with a mailto link, plus their profile photo. No more guessing who "user_2abc..." is.
🎯 "Try your first task" onboarding step
**WOW moment for new users.** After completing profile setup, new users now see a "Try your first task" screen with 4 concrete options (set a reminder, research restaurants, draft an email, make a phone call). Picking one creates a real task and drops them right into it - so they see Butler work before they even reach the home screen. Skip option available for self-directed users.
💰 Accurate cost tracking
**Real costs, not guesses.** The admin cost dashboard now tracks actual dollar costs per API call instead of using hardcoded averages. Brain (Anthropic) token usage is captured from every the AI reasoning model used at the time response. the browser automation provider used at the time agent token counts come from their metadata. Bland phone call costs use actual call duration × $0.09/min. All cost data is stored in tool_call_log and the admin dashboard reads actuals when available, falling back to updated estimates for historical data.
🌐 Professional landing page redesign
**New trybutler.xyz homepage.** Complete rewrite with interactive demo (auto-typing conversation showing grocery ordering, phone calls, travel booking, email), animated workflow graphic, capability feature cards, memory/learning section, and SEO-optimized FAQ with accordion. JSON-LD structured data for SoftwareApplication, FAQPage, and HowTo schemas. Blog linked from nav and footer.
🎫 Admins no longer charged credits
**Founder bypass.** Users listed in ADMIN_EMAILS are no longer charged credits for tool usage. The billing gate checks Clerk email against the admin list and skips credit deduction for admins. ---
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