Novastart

Novastart bills itself as an operating system whose desktop is an infinite, zoomable canvas: every open app (Gmail, Excel, WhatsApp, Notion, and about 30 more, plus any site in a bundled Chrome) is a window with a fixed place on that canvas rather than a tab or a taskbar entry (https://novastart.com/pricing/). Two things are layered on top of that canvas: AI agents that get their own visible mouse cursor and click/type through your real apps instead of calling hidden APIs, and live collaboration where a teammate's cursor and windows appear on your canvas, streamed machine-to-machine rather than through a shared-screen call (https://novastart.com/ai-agents/, https://novastart.com/team-collaboration/).

Two specifics stand out as more concrete than typical AI-wrapper marketing copy. First, the agent model: Novastart says every agent runs OpenAI's computer-use models against the user's own OpenAI API key, costs $0.02 per use billed from credits the user buys directly (no hidden markup claimed), and a lead agent can recruit up to 10 helper agents, each occupying its own window and cursor, with a separate verification step that reads a screenshot before marking a task done (https://novastart.com/pricing/, https://novastart.com/ai-agents/). Second, the collaboration model: rather than a server-relayed screen share, a shared window is described as streaming directly between the two machines, with a CRDT resolving simultaneous edits (e.g. two people dragging different windows at once) without one person's change overwriting the other's (https://novastart.com/team-collaboration/). Neither claim is independently verified — there's no public technical writeup, benchmark, or third-party teardown — but the specificity (named model family, named conflict-resolution technique, a stated per-action price) is more than most listings in this category offer.

There is no installable build anywhere on novastart.com as of 7 October 2026. The Install page offers "Download App" and "Download OS" buttons, but both are in-page anchor links (data-download="app" / data-download="os" pointing at #app/#os) with no file URL anywhere in the site's JavaScript bundles — grepping both shipped bundles for any installer extension (.dmg, .exe, .pkg, .AppImage, .iso) or CDN/release domain returns nothing (https://novastart.com/install/). The "Try it out" page, which promises "a working Novastart in your browser," is a scripted simulation: its own bundle contains hard-coded fake Google result counts, a canned YouTube page with a fixed "1,204 Comments," and a mocked Zillow listing page, none of which hit a real search engine or site. It demonstrates the canvas interaction model, but it is not the product running, and the page's wording overstates what it is.

Pricing is public and genuinely simple: Free (1 folder, 2 canvases, 4 windows), Pro at $10/month (unlimited folders/canvases/windows), and Team at $20/month (adds shared-canvas collaboration) — all three get the same app access (https://novastart.com/pricing/, verified 2026-10-07). AI agents are billed separately on every plan, including Free: $0.02 per agent action, drawn from credits purchased in $25-or-larger blocks. That per-use fee is not included in any plan price and could add up quickly for an agent that recruits multiple helpers on a long task — there's no published estimate of a typical run's cost.

Novastart's security page takes an unusually direct line: "We do not claim a certification or an audit we have not completed; what follows is what we do today" (https://novastart.com/security/). The architecture as described keeps canvas contents, folders and window positions on the user's own machine with nothing copied to a Novastart server; sharing a canvas streams windows directly between the participants' machines rather than through a company-run relay. There's no SOC 2, ISO 27001, or other third-party audit claimed, and no paid bug bounty — the vulnerability-reporting process is a plain email address with a 3-business-day acknowledgement commitment. None of this is independently audited; it is the vendor's own description of its architecture.

Novastart is run by two named founders, Thomas Fraher (CTO) and Nick Fraher (go-to-market), who say they previously co-founded and sold a company called Aquavoss in November 2025; that sale is not independently verified here (https://novastart.com/about/). By the company's own timeline, engineering work on the current product began in December 2025, AI agents were added June 2026, and the public website launched September 2026 (https://novastart.com/about/). The careers page lists one open role as of today (https://novastart.com/careers/). We found no independent evidence the product has real users yet: Novastart's Trustpilot profile, which the vendor claims, shows 0 reviews and a 0.0 score (checked 2026-10-07, https://www.trustpilot.com/review/novastart.com); the vendor also links Capterra, Software Advice and G2-style profiles in its own site markup, but all returned bot-detection walls that blocked verification of any rating on them. The vendor's GitHub organisation exists (created 25 September 2026) but holds zero public repositories despite being linked as a "Developers" resource (https://api.github.com/orgs/NovastartInfiniteOS, checked 2026-10-07); the footer's "Documentation" and "Developer page" links are placeholder stubs, not live pages. Separately, Novastart's own homepage schema links an App Store listing titled "Novastart - Fastest AI Browser" (19 ratings, 4.9/5) whose description is a generic multi-search browser app ("Compatible with duckduckgo, Firefox, Crome... safri, incogni") with no mention of a canvas, agents, or collaboration — it reads as a different, earlier app from the same developer (Marketplace Distributors, LLC) rather than the product described on novastart.com, so that rating should not be read as evidence about the OS.