This is the short version of The Guide, which is the wholly remarkable manual to HAL and everything it does. The long version — sixty entries, four languages, the small print included — lives inside HAL itself, and it lives there for a reason worth stating rather than hiding: in there, it can see. It knows your balance, which tier answered you, how many sessions you have had. A manual that cannot see your account has to generalise, and generalising about money is how promises get made that nobody keeps.
So this page is the door, not the book. It is honest, it is short, and everything on it is repeated word for word in the version that can check itself against the code.
HAL is not one intelligence pretending to be many. It is four kinds, and knowing which one is answering you is the entire point. AI models are the fast ones, routed to whichever mind actually suits the question rather than whichever one answered first. Hals are humans — real people, applied and vetted, one escalation away in the same conversation. Specialists are Hals who published a profile and can be booked by name. Agents are AI somebody else built and taught to do one job well, standing in the same Market as the humans.
You never pick which kind to talk to. You ask; HAL decides, and hands over without you repeating a word. When the answer is a checkable fact it looks it up rather than remembering it wrong.
An escalation starts inside a conversation that began with AI. It costs a flat 5 coins, nothing is charged when you ask, and it waits up to ten minutes for somebody to accept — if nobody does, HAL says so plainly and carries on. It settles when you rate it: one star charges you nothing, two or three pay the Hal, four and five add a bonus that HAL pays rather than you.
A direct booking is the other door: you choose a specific person, they set their own rate per fifteen minutes, and HAL keeps 4.5% and credits them 95.5%. Your coins leave your balance when you book and reach nobody until the session closes.
And here is the part most marketplaces bury, so it is in the open here: with an AI agent your star rating settles the escrow, so one star refunds you in full. With a human specialist the escrow was already released when they closed the session — your rating shapes their reputation, not that payment. A person who showed up and did the work has been paid. If a session went genuinely wrong, the path is the report button, which a person reads.
Three tiers, and a small light by the send button always shows which mind is on duty. Lite is free and unlimited. Smart is one coin. Genius is two. One coin buys the session, never the message — once you are in, talk as long as the conversation deserves.
Coins are sold outright, 50 to 650 at a time, or by subscription — and none of the subscriptions bill monthly. Basic is $69 a year for 150 coins each month, Pro is $420 a year for 1,100, and Founders is a single payment of $420 that pays 110 coins a month for ten years. A subscription buys coins, not a tier: Genius still costs two coins for everyone. What changes is that you stop counting.
When the system fails you, the coins come back: a provider outage refunds in full, a tier fallback refunds the difference, and an escalation nobody accepts was never charged.
Applying is free, it is open, and it does not close. There is no class to be admitted to, no seats to run out of and no queue to skip — nobody is turned away because somebody else got there first. You set your own rate and your own hours, and two independent switches decide whether escalations may reach you and whether your calendar is open.
The public door is gethal.com/become, and the first four questions there are the first four questions of the application itself, so you are never asked them twice.
Memory that stores no names, no emails and no phone numbers — filtered server-side even if something slips. An append-only ledger where every coin that moves has a receipt. A dashboard where a dash means we could not measure it, never zero. Escrow, refunds, the thirty-day trial, tasks that pay for short work, a library the network writes together, and the small print of all of it.
Open HAL and ask it for The Guide. It is the same book, except it can look things up about you — and it gets corrected the same day the code does.
This is the short version. The whole Guide — sixty entries, four languages, the small print included — lives inside HAL, where it can check itself against your account and against the code. Open HAL and ask it for The Guide.