Most people who start pricing a virtual assistant are not really trying to buy hours. They are trying to stop dropping things. Those are different purchases, and confusing them is how you end up paying a monthly retainer for a problem that was never about capacity.
This is a straight breakdown of what the options cost, what each is actually good at, and where the money is wasted.
The rough shape of the market
Prices move and vary by region, so treat these as orders of magnitude rather than quotes.
Offshore virtual assistant, hourly. The cheapest option, typically billed by the hour through a marketplace or a small agency. Good for defined, repeatable, low context work: data entry, research lists, travel logistics, calendar mechanics, inbox triage against clear rules. The constraint is context, not capability. Someone working ten hours a week across a time zone gap will not accumulate the understanding of your business needed to make judgement calls, and asking them to is unfair to both of you.
Managed VA service. An agency layer over the same thing, at a meaningful premium. You are paying for vetting, cover when your person is ill, and a manager who deals with the relationship. Worth it if you do not want to be somebody's employer. Same context limitation.
Fractional or part time executive assistant. The middle of the market, usually a monthly retainer for a set number of hours from someone genuinely experienced. This is where quality changes rather than just price. An experienced EA at twenty hours a week can hold real context, anticipate, and make decisions you would have made.
Full time executive assistant. A salary, plus everything that comes with employing a person. In major markets this is a serious commitment, and for people who genuinely need it, it is the highest leverage hire they will make.
The jump between those tiers is not really about hours. It is about how much context the person can hold, and context is what you are actually paying for.
What a person is genuinely irreplaceable for
Worth stating plainly, because the rest of this piece is about the exception.
A good assistant makes decisions on your behalf and gets them right. They know that this client gets a call rather than an email, that the Tuesday meeting can move but the Thursday one cannot, and that a particular request from a particular person means something other than what it says. They handle the things that require a human on the other end. They notice you are overloaded before you do.
None of that is automatable, and anyone claiming otherwise is overselling. If your bottleneck is that you need a second brain with judgement, hire a person.
The part you should not hire a person for
Follow through is the exception, and it is often the reason people start looking in the first place.
Consider what it actually takes to make sure nothing you promised disappears. Somebody has to notice every commitment you make, including the ones made in a message sent at midnight from your phone. They have to remember all of them without decay. They have to raise the ones that are slipping, repeatedly, without becoming apologetic about it. And they have to do that on day nine and day fourteen and day twenty one, when it has become socially awkward to keep asking.
Humans are unusually bad at exactly this. Not through incompetence, but because the work is relentless, unrewarding, and interpersonally uncomfortable. Chasing your own boss for the fourth time about the thing they said they would send is a genuinely unpleasant task, and most assistants, being reasonable people, soften it. The fourth ask is gentler than the second. That is the exact inverse of what needs to happen.
There is also a coverage problem that no amount of diligence solves. Your assistant knows about the commitments they saw. They were not on the email thread where you said you would review the contract by Thursday, and they were not in the direct message where you told a colleague you would pick something up. For most people, the majority of what they owe is created in writing, alone, in places nobody else is looking.
So the follow through part of the job is simultaneously the part humans do least well and the part that costs the most to buy, because you are paying senior rates for attention rather than for judgement.
The honest comparison
Software has no judgement, and it should not pretend to.
But it does not find it awkward to ask again. It does not soften on the fourth attempt. It was on every email you sent, including the midnight one, because it is reading the same accounts you are. It is awake at eleven at night when you remember something. And it costs a rounding error against any of the tiers above.
That is a narrow claim, and it is worth being clear about its limits. Software will not call the client. It will not know that today is the wrong day to push you. It will not notice you are burnt out. It cannot cover for you.
What it can do is guarantee that the specific failure of I said I would send that and then four days passed stops happening.
How to decide
Two questions, and they separate cleanly.
Are you short of hands, or short of follow through? If work is genuinely not getting done because there are not enough hours in the day, you need a person. If the work is small, you know exactly what it is, and it still does not happen, you do not have a capacity problem. Adding a person to a follow through problem produces someone who watches you not do things.
Do the things you drop require judgement? If what slips is nuanced and relational, a person is the answer. If what slips is a two line email you have been meaning to send since Tuesday, no amount of seniority helps. That is not a job anyone should be paid to chase you about.
Most people, asked honestly, find their answer is follow through rather than capacity. It is worth checking before signing a retainer.
Where Wasp fits
Wasp does the follow through half and nothing else. It reads the places you make commitments, tracks what you owe and what you are owed, and escalates when something starts slipping rather than quietly rolling it forward. When it reaches the top of that escalation it makes you decide: do it, schedule it, or drop it on purpose.
It costs a fraction of any assistant, because it is doing the one part of that job that is mechanical.
If you need judgement, hire the person. Plenty of people need both, and the two do not compete: the best outcome for someone with a great EA is usually that the EA stops spending their week chasing, and starts spending it on the work that actually needed a human.