What would AI email cost?
State-of-the-art models range from $22 to $130 per month. At $26/month raw cost, a software company seeking 75% gross margin would charge about $500/year.
A Google Enterprise plan is $11-18/month. A fully agentic solution would cost about twice as much.
But smaller models cut cost by 10-20x. Running models locally drops cost to zero : the user's GPU does the work.
The next 12-24 months of AI software will be defined by this optimization : which components can be executed deterministically (like email filters, which are just rules) & matching the model to the workload.
With basic heuristics & techniques, we can drop overall cost by 100x. Given the GPU shortage, this segmentation of inference is inevitable.
https://tomtunguz.com/cost-of-ai-email/
