Poe Creator Guide

Poe is a platform for people to discover and use AI products created by many different companies and individuals. Anyone can create applications and bots on Poe.

Reasons to create on Poe

Distribution: Poe's recommendation system allows you to reach a large audience for your apps and bots for free. Users can also conveniently share their chats with bots both internally on Poe and externally, leading to even more exposure.
Monetization: Poe lets you easily generate revenue from users all around the world. You can set a price per message that you'll be paid for every message to your bot, and you can also get referral fees when your bot causes new users to subscribe to Poe. As of August 2024, the top self-service creator on Poe is generating hundreds of thousands in annualized revenue, and larger companies are generating millions.
Costs: Operating a publicly available application or bot powered by large language models is prohibitively expensive for most, but creating an app or bot on Poe allows you to offload model inference costs entirely to Poe.
Multi-platform UI: Poe's native presence on all major platforms (Web, iOS, Android, MacOS, and Windows) means that your users have a great, consistent experience with your apps and bots no matter what device they are on, with login and synchronized history taken care of by the platform.
Model independence: Building on Poe lets you build your product using models from all different providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and more, and open source models like Llama 3.3, FLUX, or DeepSeek). Poe is a neutral platform and so by building here, you can continually adapt your product use any combination of the best technologies as they are created, no matter who each one is made by.
Fundraising: If your product gets meaningful usage on Poe, that is an important signal to potential investors. We maintain a list of high quality investors who have told us they are interested in hearing about successful developers that are raising money and, with your permission, we will email them and broker connections. (details)

In summary, Poe lets creators focus entirely on the unique part of their creations: how a bot will respond, or what the UI and logic for an app will be. Poe handles everything else needed to bring it to a large audience, to operate it at scale, and to build a business.

Ways to create on Poe

We provide several ways to create products on top of Poe:

Prompt bots are custom bots built on top of existing models (for example Claude 3.7 Sonnet, GPT-4o, or Llama 3.3 can all be used). Prompt bot behavior is specified using plain-text instructions that the model will follow during conversation with users. Creating a prompt bot does not require writing any code, just natural language instructions. To learn how to make a prompt bot, see the prompt bot tutorial.
Server bots are bots powered by a custom backend that runs your code in response to every user message. Server bots can call any other bot (like GPT-4o, Claude-3.7-Sonnet, or any prompt bot or other server bot) on Poe for free, which can significantly enhance the capabilities of your bot without you having to incur expensive model inference costs proportional to usage. To learn how to create a server bot, check out our quick start.
Canvas apps are graphical user interfaces that live inside Poe. They take the form of embedded web applications and unlike prompt bots and server bots, they enable you to create experiences that would not fit into a simple chat experience. These canvas apps can interact with the chat and query any bot on Poe, enabling you to create new user interfaces and workflows that build on top of all of the AI that already exists. Creating a canvas app does not require writing any code, thanks to our App Creator bot that can guide you through the process. To learn how to create a canvas app, see our quick start guide.
External applications exist outside the Poe client UI. They connect to Poe via a Poe user's API key, and use the Poe API to query Poe bots and models on behalf of that user, spending the user's points in the process. External applications can be anything from a browser extension to a shell script to an arbitrary client application like an IDE. To learn how to make an external application, see the External Application Guide.