2026.10.08 | Substack | META | META Muse: Growth Dip Then Retention Upside

Agent Retention Doesn’t Behave Like Consumer App Retention

Two weeks ago we published our note on Muse monetization.

Deep|META: Could Muse be the Inflection Point Market Looking for?

Sep 21

We’ve been discussing Muse’s potential to reshape Meta’s business with our institutional clients for the past two weeks, especially during our weekly calls. We thought it was time to share that thinking here, too.

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Agent products retain users very differently from most consumer internet products.

Most consumer apps launch with their core features already in place, so retention settles early.

Some apps keep improving retention for months or even years after launch. Social media and short-video platforms are the obvious examples. Network effects and a growing base of content and connections make them stickier over time.

Agents look more like the second group. According to our estimates, the ChatGPT app’s D14 retention sat around 10% for its first six months and only moved above 10% in late 2023. It is now approaching 25% (Figure 1).

Figure 1: ChatGPT Retention by Cohort Day (Jan 2024 – Aug 2026) (Source: FUNDA Estimation)

Muse’s D14 Is Close to Long-Term Retention and Still Rising

Muse shows a similar pattern (Figure 2):

Subscribed

1. Retention drops sharply from D1 to D7, then barely moves from D7 to D14. That suggests D14 is already close to

long-term retention.

1. D14 has improved as Muse has added use cases, rising from about 9% to about 16% over the observation period, per our

estimates.

1. Muse is too new to have usable D28 data, so D14 is the best metric we have for now.

Figure 2: Muse Retention by Cohort Day (Sep 27 – Oct 6, 2026) (Source: FUNDA Estimation)

At Current Serving Costs, Scaling Acquisition Doesn’t Make Sense Yet

Muse is expensive to serve. We estimates that supporting 1 million DAU takes roughly 50,000 GPUs. At that marginal cost, a large user acquisition push would be hard to justify right now. We think Muse is more likely to wait until D14 retention and the product mature before its next push.

Figure 3: Muse DAU and Cumulative Downloads (Sep 1 – Oct 1, 2026) (Source: FUNDA Estimation)

The Muse Team Is Working Hard on Re-engagement

Product details suggest the Muse team cares a lot about retention and re-engagement. Three things we noticed:

1. Muse sends more notifications than Instinct.
2. Muse may dig up an email from a few days ago and send a push reminding you about it. Instinct does this too.
3. Instinct asks for payment details aggressively right at sign-up. Muse is gentler at first but keeps finding new

moments to ask later on.

Expect Growth in Steps

All of this makes us think Muse will hold off on its next acquisition push until retention and other key metrics are where it wants them. If so, growth will come in steps rather than along a smooth curve.

We estimates that once retention reaches that bar and Muse ramps up push notifications, DAU could pass 10 million quickly. Until then, expect a flatter stretch.

Appendix: Muse vs. Instinct Use Cases

Figure 4 compares how people use Muse and Instinct. Based on our monitored sample, Muse users lean toward content generation (24.7% vs. 17.6%) and coding (12.0% vs. 3.9%). Instinct users do more transactional work, such as bookings (19.4% vs. 10.9%) and sending emails and messages (19.4% vs. 9.7%). If there are other comparisons you’d like to see, let us know.

Figure 4: Muse vs. Instinct User Behavior and Re-engagement (Sep 8 – Oct 7, 2026) (Source: FUNDA Monitored Sample)

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