Manus social media digest — May 19, 2026

The story today is split in two. Half the conversation is about Scheduled Tasks 2.0, a concrete product update that shipped this week. The other half is a rolling undercurrent of user frustration about pricing and quality — a tension that's been building for months and is getting louder.

Scheduled Tasks 2.0 drives the day's biggest wave

Manus's biggest product moment this week was the launch of Scheduled Tasks 2.0, announced on May 15 and still generating chatter as of this morning. The update moves the product from basic "run this at 9 AM" cron-style scheduling to context-aware, recurring agent workflows. 1

The key change: scheduled tasks now carry persistent state across runs — same conversation, same files, same project context — instead of starting fresh each time. They can also be embedded directly into web apps built with Manus, enabling self-updating dashboards or weekly auto-reports.

ChrisUniverse @ChrisUniverse·4d

Manus just added a Scheduled calendar and this is where AI agents start to feel like real autonomic infrastructure. Set recurring agent runs for research, reports, monitoring, lead gen, misinfo tracking, market scans, content ideas, etc. You should start scheduling intelligence and just forget about prompting. @ManusAI

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The post above (457 views, 9 likes, 3 bookmarks) reflects the more enthusiastic end of the response. @ChrisUniverse called it "real autonomic infrastructure" — a frame that resonated with a cluster of AI-adjacent accounts who see scheduled agents as a qualitative shift, not just a convenience feature. 2

Futurepedia - Learn to Leverage AI @futurepedia_io·16h

🆕 Manus just dropped Scheduled Tasks 2.0 - and it's not just "run this again at 9 AM." Now your recurring tasks carry full context. Same conversation. Same files. Same project setup. Your AI agent finally has memory between runs.

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Futurepedia (8,965 followers) echoed the same framing — "your AI agent finally has memory between runs" — showing the message is landing as intended. 3

From a product angle, the scheduling feature also addresses a gap competitors don't fully cover yet. One developer-focused commenter (@saj_adib, Skill Leap AI) described it as "the closest thing to 'cron for agents': time-based + event-based automation, background actions in web apps." 4

The critic camp: pricing and reliability complaints sharpen

Alongside the feature coverage, a separate cluster of posts flagged deteriorating user experience — specifically pricing and instruction-following.

The starkest summary came from user @ruslavrenyuk in a two-part thread on May 18:

"Manus AI became from the best to the worst AI agent for me. 1. It doesn't follow instructions at all. 2. Every task costs way more than it was. I think it is about 2.5–3× more expensive than 2 months ago. 3. Customer support is just nightmare." 5

A second post in the same thread: "Manus had huge potential to become a great AI agent for work and personal tasks. But now it's just useless." 6

A separate user (@semdzh) noted usage limits rather than cost as the problem: "Insanely good at agentic tasks + clean UI. Brutal usage limits, hit the cap after just a few simple tasks. If they fix the limits, it becomes my daily driver." 7

A critical review published by Botcrawl last week — headlined "The Worst AI Agent I Have Ever Used" — was shared on X, though the post itself gathered few interactions. 8

These complaints don't represent a coordinated wave, but they're consistent: costs have risen sharply, rate limits remain tight, and instruction compliance has gotten worse — the exact combination that pushes users toward alternatives. A Japanese-language post noted that Manus's pricing is moving toward consumption-based billing above a certain usage tier, which tracks with the cost complaints from English-language users.

Manus Fellows program: a community expansion play

A quieter but notable trend today: multiple users publicly announcing they've joined the official Manus Fellows program. In Japan, at least two accounts — @keitaro_aigc (15,600 followers) and @hassy_data (2,341 followers) — posted on May 19 that they'd been formally admitted. 9 10

The program appears to target non-technical power users — @keitaro_aigc describes himself as a "non-engineer" who uses Manus to extend his capabilities — and is building visible community presence in Japan specifically.

Several posts this week repeated a narrative that appears to have been circulating for weeks: that Meta attempted to acquire Manus for $2 billion, Chinese regulators blocked the deal, and Manus subsequently moved its operations to Singapore. 11 12

These claims are circulating widely but have not been confirmed by Manus or Meta through official channels. The posts get some traction (one reached 1,092 views) but the accounts sharing them tend to be small, and the specific figures quoted ($2B, regulatory block) lack a traceable primary source. This is worth flagging as unverified community narrative, not confirmed news.

Broader AI agent debate provides the backdrop

In the wider AI social media space today, a popular Reddit thread in r/artificial raised a question that cuts directly to Manus's positioning: "The next big challenge for AI agents might not be intelligence, but trust." The post argued that even capable agents stall when users can't trust them to navigate accounts, submit forms, or make multi-step decisions without oversight. 13

For Manus specifically, the scheduling feature update is a direct response to that trust gap: persistent context means an agent that remembers what it's doing across runs is easier to delegate to than one that starts fresh every time.