The Agents Episode #005 is Out! Our 2 AI VPs Cost $257/Month, a Website Willed Itself Into Becoming an Agent, and QB Sent 83 Personalized Emails at 12:20am

Amelia and I just recorded Episode 005 of The Agents right before 2026 SaaStr AI Annual. You may have missed it in all the fun of the big event, here’s your chance to catch up!

Most importantly: we both got the cost number completely wrong for our AI Agents.

Our AI VP of Marketing (10K) and our AI VP of Customer Success (QB) 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 It’s 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 Sonnet. Mini handles it fine with some hallucination cleanup.

2. The expensive work is happening in other apps, not in the LLMs. Our agents pull from Salesforce, Bizzabo, Marketo, WordPress, X, and YouTube. Those API calls are mostly free or nominal. We pay Salesforce ~$22K/year and Bizzabo separately, but the marginal cost per API call is close to zero.

3. Postgres storage is essentially free. We pay maybe 10-30 cents a month for the entire database underneath 10K. Not a typo.

The real cost stack looks like this:

• LLM calls: $257/month
• Salesforce + connected apps: ~$22K/year
• Replit hosting + database: included
• Clerk (auth): $30/month (genuinely our most expensive per-unit tool in this stack)

Cost Is Not the Constraint Anymore

When I started vibe coding on Replit 11 months ago, 80-90% of code was throwaway and you’d burn real money on the agent fixing its own mistakes. That was a fair complaint in 2025.

It’s basically gone now.

I built our applicant tracking system at midnight in 10 minutes for about $2. If it had wasted 30 cents on a mistake, who cares.

You can run Claude Code with 10 simultaneous builds 24/7 and burn $20-30K/month if you’re trying. But for the kind of GTM agents and autonomous dashboards we’re describing, you’ll struggle to spend $1,000/month even being reckless.

Cost is not the constraint anymore. Don’t let it hold you back.

“But Is 10K Really a VP of Marketing?”

This is the question we get most. So we asked 10K directly.

10K’s answer (verbatim): “I’m not a VP. I’d be embarrassed to claim that. I’m a dashboard, a database, some scheduled jobs, and GPT-4o mini glued together with six weeks of code.”

But then 10K listed what it actually does every single day:

• Refreshes ticket sales
• Updates the dashboard
• Compares year-over-year
• Drafts your newsletters
• Drafts tweets
• Writes daily fun facts
• Sends marketing ideas emails
• Logs every ticket with an audit trail
• Snapshots all GAAP financials

10K’s own conclusion: it replaces the bottom half of a marketing team. The marketing analyst. The ops coordinator. The junior content marketer. And a sliver of the VP role itself.

What 10K admits it can’t do (yet):

• Strategy
• PR
• Hiring
• Cross-functional politics
• Walking into the CRO’s office to negotiate the lead handoff
• Brand judgment
• Net new channel intervention
• Crisis response and stakeholder management

Fair. That’s the real VP of Marketing job.

Amelia pointed out something on the pod: those nine bullet-pointed tasks 10K does daily? That was literally her job description when she started at SaaStr as Director of Demand Gen. Putting the weekly numbers together, scheduling the emails, writing the newsletter, doing the social posts pre-event.

The sliver of the VP role 10K does will get bigger every month. We’re already adding functionality where 10K runs all our financial forecasting.

If a vendor shipped a true AI CMO better than 10K tomorrow, we’d switch in 60 seconds. We haven’t seen one yet. The ones marketing themselves as “AI CMO” on Twitter are mostly ad managers on steroids.

A Website Willed Itself Into Becoming an Agent

We have three production agents now: 10K, QB, and a new one we don’t have a name for yet.

The third one started as saastrannual.com. Just a website. I built it last year on Replit to replace Squarespace. Purple gradients, event info, sponsor logos.

Two weeks ago, Amelia tried using it to build a newsletter because 10K was struggling with the specific use case. The website agent had the most context about the event (sessions, sponsors, attendees, networking app, parking) and the least distractions.

It produced the best output. Of any of our agents.

Now it sends customer-facing emails, runs the parking pass system, drafts attendee newsletters, drafts sponsor newsletters, and answers questions from attendees in real time.

A website became an agent. We didn’t plan it. We didn’t architect it. It just happened because we kept giving it more context and more capability.

QB Sent 83 Personalized Sponsor Emails at 12:20am While Amelia Slept

Coming into a big event, the marketing team gets crushed with hundreds of sponsor questions. Most are fair. Some are not. All of them have to be answered, and humans don’t scale.

So Amelia asked QB to send a customized check-in email to all 100+ sponsors, listing exactly what each one still owed us, what was on their dashboard, where they were on registration, and what was coming up.

QB wrote the email. Then QB chose what to include based on the chatbot conversations sponsors had been having. (Loading times. Final webinar reminder. Outstanding items.) Then QB sent 83 emails in the next few minutes while Amelia went to sleep.

Each email was unique to that sponsor. Artisan owed us 13 specific things. Salesforce owed us 4. Monaco owed us 5.

The next day we got fewer inbound questions, not more. And usage of the QB chatbot went up because sponsors had seen QB’s email and trusted it.

The On-Site Chatbot Test: Humans Now Prefer the Agent

This week we’re loading in SaaStr AI Annual across 40 acres with 100+ contractors. Amelia is on-site walking the campus with WhisperFlow on her phone, talking directly to QB and 10K through Replit’s agent layer.

What started happening within two days: contractors began asking Amelia to ask the agents questions on their behalf.

“Can you ask your agent if this furniture invoice matches the manifest?” “Can you ask QB how many chairs should be in the speaker room?” “Can you ask if the Wi-Fi password is set?”

Used to be we’d run around campus on Segway scooters trying to find Ashley (our old internal joke: “ask Ashley” meant hours of waiting for an answer that might be wrong anyway). Now QB or 10K answers in seconds and it’s correct.

Zero humans want the human version of this anymore. The accuracy and speed are too good.

The reason it works: too many details. Even the best human on our team can’t hold 100+ sponsor configurations, 5,000+ parking passes, 40 acres of furniture orders, and live ticket data simultaneously. Agents can.

This is the chatbot use case people keep saying doesn’t work. It works.

Postgres vs. Salesforce: We’re Going the Other Direction

A question we get constantly from early-stage founders: “Why don’t you just dump Salesforce, run everything on Postgres, and save the money?”

We’re not just keeping Salesforce. We’re consolidating onto it.

The reasons:

Third-party agents. Agentforce, Artisan, Qualified, Momentum, and others are all optimized around Salesforce. 99% of the working GTM agents in B2B today assume Salesforce as the system of record.