
The Agents Episode #005 is Out! Our 2 AI VPs Cost $257/Month, a Website Willed Itself Into Becoming an Agent, and QBee Sent 83 Personalized Emails at 12:20am
From The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors by Jason M. Lemkin 🦄
May 23, 2026 · 2 min
About this episode
The episode discusses the cost-effectiveness and capabilities of AI VPs in marketing and customer success.
Amelia and I just recorded Episode 005 of The Agents. We both got the cost number completely wrong. Our AI VP of Marketing (10K) and our AI VP of Customer Success (QBee) cost a combined $257 a month to run. I thought it was a daily number when I first saw the alert from Replit. Amelia thought it was a daily number too when I sent it to her on Slack. It’s monthly. For context: those two agents now do work that previously required real humans. 10K refreshes ticket sales, updates dashboards, compares year-over-year, drafts newsletters, drafts tweets, writes daily fun facts, sends marketing ideas emails, logs every ticket with an audit trail, and snapshots all our GAAP financials. QB manages 100+ sponsors, sends fully personalized check-in emails, and runs an autonomous chatbot that 100+ contractors are now using on-site at SaaStr AI Annual. $257 a month. Together. Why Our AI VP Marketing and AI VP Customer Success Are So Cheap Three reasons. 1. Most LLM calls run on cheap models. About 95% of our OpenAI calls use GPT-4o mini, which costs less than a penny per call. Force-ranking ticket data, running year-over-year comparisons, drafting daily updates. None of this needs Opus or even…
People in this episode
Host: Jason M. Lemkin
Guest: Amelia
Topics covered
- AI in business
- cost efficiency
- automation
- customer success
- marketing technology
- SaaS
Keywords
- AI VPs
- cost
- automation
- SaaS
- marketing
- customer success
- GPT-4o mini
- Replit
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Replit, Salesforce, Bizzabo, Marketo, WordPress, YouTube
Products: GPT-4o mini, 10K, QBee
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