Jason Calacanis says under $40K a year of AI tools now does $2M+ of work and has automated seven full-time jobs
Investor and podcaster Jason Calacanis posted that he spends under $40,000 a year on tokens and subscriptions from Anthropic, Lovable, Grok Bot, ElevenLabs and a long tail of other tools, and gets more than $2 million in value across his companies LAUNCH and This Week in Startups. He says they've automated at least seven full-time jobs and are about twice as fast at the average task. His advice: if you haven't spent around 30 hours a week with the products released in the last 90 days, you don't know how much has changed. The post passed 300,000 views within hours.
Why it matters
It's a rare public cost-versus-value number from someone running real companies. Even if the figures are rough, the ratio is why so many small teams are rebuilding their workflows around agents right now.
Who it's for
Founders, small-business owners and team leads deciding whether paid AI tools pay for themselves.
How to try it
- List the five most repetitive tasks on your team and the hours each takes per week.
- Try one AI tool on each task for two weeks and log the time it saves and the time spent fixing its output.
- Compare the saved hours with what the subscriptions cost before you add more tools.
Plan & availability: His numbers are his own estimate and weren't broken down by tool. Every product he names has its own paid plans, and some have free tiers.
Note: reported by users on X; we haven't independently confirmed it works in the current version.
Source: Jason Calacanis (@Jason) on X
Written by AgentStackList from the original post. Checked Nov 2, 2026. Features, plans and availability can change, so confirm on the source before you rely on it.
grok-botanthropicelevenlabsautomationroi
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