Credit where it's due: Lindy is a good personal assistant.
Let's be fair, because you're comparing and you deserve a straight answer.
Lindy's assistant is slick. Texting it is genuinely low-friction — no app to open, no dashboard to learn. If what's drowning you is your own inbox and calendar, it delivers. Their customers say so: "Before, I was totally slaved to my inbox. Now, I'm saving anywhere from five to seven hours a week" (a G2 reviewer). Another called it "like having a dedicated employee working 24/7" (a G2 reviewer).
That's a real result — for one person's email.
Here's the turn: your inbox was never the whole job. Somebody still has to pull Monday's numbers, compare ROAS across Meta and Google, draft the win-back campaign, reconcile Shopify against QuickBooks, and get the leads into the CRM. That work doesn't live in your texts. It lives in your business — and your team's Slack is where it gets discussed, assigned, and shipped.
That's the job Sterling was built for. It initiates that work, finishes it, and brings it to the thread — it does the internal jobs you delegate, then checks with you before anything goes to a customer. The work gets finished, not advised on.
Two different jobs. Pick the one you're hiring for.
| Lindy | Sterling | |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | Personal admin — one exec's email, calendar, and meetings | Business ops — audits, reports, campaigns, CRM updates, reconciliation |
| Where it lives | iMessage/SMS texting; Slack is one integration among hundreds | Your team's Slack — the place the work already happens |
| Who can use it | Inbox limits by plan: 2 (Plus), 3 (Pro), 5 (Max) | Unlimited seats — no per-seat charges; the whole team shares 20,000 monthly credits |
| Ecommerce jobs | No Shopify/Klaviyo playbooks | Weekly Shopify/Klaviyo audits, ROAS comparisons, win-back drafts, QuickBooks reconciliation — today |
| Pricing | Plus $49.99 / Pro $99.99 / Max $199.99; "usage" tiers without published counts; free plan discontinued | $50/month = 20,000 credits for the whole workspace, posted right on the pricing page |
| When usage runs low | Opt-in overages billed at 2× the standard rate; no one-off credit purchases | Sterling pings you in Slack at 80%. A top-up is $25 for 10,000 credits — decided by you, not discovered on an invoice. Run out entirely and it pauses; it never surprise-bills you |
| Access control | Broad permissions across email, calendar, and cloud storage — a G2 reviewer's stated reason for not trusting it with sensitive data | You set each person's access per tool: off, view, or full. Nothing gets sent to your customers, charged, or deleted without your go in the thread |
| Audit trail | Not documented for the assistant | Every action logged, reviewable from the dashboard |
| Trying it | 7-day trial (Plus features only) | 20,000 free credits on your real stack — cancel anytime from the dashboard |
All Lindy details verified July 2026 from lindy.ai pricing and public reviews.
The work that eats your week doesn't arrive by text.
You looked at an AI assistant because you're doing too many jobs. One owner put it exactly: "Wearing all the hats. I'm the operator, bookkeeper, dispatcher, mechanic, and laborer all rolled up into one" (a Reddit owner).
An assistant that triages your email helps. But Friday afternoon you're still in a spreadsheet, pulling the weekly numbers by hand. The win-back campaign you meant to send is still a draft in your head. The leads from last week are still screenshots. And every week you run without the report, you're steering blind — "It's impossible to make a good decision if you have bad information" (a Reddit owner).
Here's the thing: none of that is inbox work. It's operations. It touches Shopify, Klaviyo, your ad accounts, QuickBooks, the CRM — and it needs to land where your team can see it, not in a text thread on your phone.
Sterling does the job, then checks with you before it ships.
Sterling is a coworker in your team's Slack. You type the job — "Run our weekly Shopify and Klaviyo audit" — and Sterling initiates: connects to your stack, pulls the numbers, compares ROAS across channels, flags what moved, drafts the recovery campaign in your voice.
The finished work arrives in the thread. The internal jobs you delegate — create the doc, update the CRM record — just get done, then reported. Anything that leaves your business or can't be undone — a send, an external post, a delete — waits for your go. You reply. It executes. It's logged.
Sterling does everything up to the send. The send is yours.
Benefits
1. Monday's report is already built Sterling connects to Shopify, Klaviyo, Meta and Google Ads, QuickBooks, and your CRM — 3,000+ apps — and runs the audit end to end. Which means the weekly numbers stop being your Friday. Say it's Monday and the digest is due: it's in the thread before you've had coffee, with the anomalies flagged and the campaign drafted. (Scenario — run it on your own store and see.)
2. Nothing leaves your business without your go A skeptical owner wrote the acceptance test for this whole category: *"if there's no exception queue, audit log, and big red pause button, it's not automation, it's just a faster way to lose money"* (a Reddit owner). Sterling is built as exactly that. The job runs in a Slack thread you can see, every action lands in the audit log, and pause is a dashboard button. It does the work. You keep the veto.
3. Your whole team gets the coworker No inbox caps, no per-seat charges. Everyone in the workspace can delegate to Sterling, and $50 covers 20,000 credits of finished tasks a month. Your ops lead hands it the reconciliation; you hand it the audit; the same go-before-it-ships rule applies to everyone — with each person's access set by you: off, view, or full, per tool.
4. Ecommerce is the job description Not a roadmap item. Weekly store audits, ROAS comparisons, win-back drafts, QuickBooks reconciliation, CRM enrichment — Sterling runs a store's known jobs now, self-serve. That focus is also why the credits behave: a coworker doing known jobs, with defined scope, is predictable in a way an open-ended generalist isn't.
5. Pricing you can reason about $50 a month gets your whole team 20,000 credits that cover the jobs you actually delegate. Run low? Sterling pings you in Slack at 80% — before it matters. A top-up is $25 for 10,000 credits. If credits run out, Sterling pauses and tells you; it never surprise-bills you. Compare that with usage tiers that don't publish counts and overages billed at double rate — and decide which invoice you'd rather explain to yourself.
How it works
1. Add Sterling to your Slack — minutes, no IT contractor, no code, no sales call. 2. Connect your apps — Shopify, Klaviyo, your ad accounts, QuickBooks, the CRM. You set each teammate's access: off, view, or full, per tool. 3. Delegate and approve — type the job in plain English. The finished work arrives in the thread; nothing gets sent, charged, or deleted without your go. Recurring jobs run on schedule, with the same gate every time.
Frequently Asked Questions
I've tried AI tools before. What happens on week three? Fair — *"the real question is what happens on week three when an edge case shows up"* (a Reddit owner). Week three with Sterling shows up as an approval request in a thread you're already reading, not a silent failure you discover on an invoice. Week three is where automations go to die. Sterling doesn't have flows to break — it has a job.
Your first 20,000 credits are free — and they run on your real stack, not a demo store. Add Sterling to your Slack, hand it the weekly audit, and watch the loop run: pull, analyze, draft, your go.
The weekly audit is the best first test because you know exactly how long it takes you by hand. If the finished report is worth less than $50 a month to you, stop there — you've spent nothing, and there's no contract to escape. Cancel anytime from the dashboard.
Worst case, you got a free audit of your own store. The downside of trying is one Slack app. The downside of not trying is the Friday you already know by heart.
P.S.
If Lindy is saving you five hours a week on email, keep it — that's a good trade. This page is about the other forty: the audit, the campaigns, the reconciliation, the CRM. That work needs a coworker in your team's Slack that checks with you before anything ships, and it costs $50 a month to find out. Your first 20,000 credits are free, on your real store.