Every morning, most people spend 30–45 minutes on email. Moving newsletters to folders, flagging client requests, deleting promotions, drafting quick replies to things that didn't need more than two sentences.
Companion can do all of it in under 5 minutes while you make coffee.
Here's exactly how to set it up.
What you need
- Companion installed (download here)
- An OpenRouter API key (free to create, pay per token — typically $0.003–0.015 per 1,000 tokens)
- A Gmail account
No Zapier. No subscription. No code.
Step 1: Install Companion and connect your API key
Download Companion for Windows or macOS. During onboarding, you'll be prompted to enter your OpenRouter key. Paste it in — it's stored locally on your machine and never sent to Companion's servers.
To get an OpenRouter key: sign up at openrouter.ai, go to API Keys, and create one. It's free. You only pay for the tokens you actually use.
Step 2: Connect Gmail
Open the Settings menu in Companion's sidebar and navigate to Integrations. Find Gmail in the list and click Connect.
You'll be redirected to a Google OAuth screen — the standard "allow this app" flow. Authorize it. The whole process takes about 60 seconds.
Once connected, test it immediately: type or say "How many unread emails do I have?" Companion should respond with the current count from your actual inbox.
Step 3: Run your first triage
Here's the prompt that replaces 30 minutes of manual sorting:
Go through my unread emails from the last 24 hours. Label anything from a client as Priority. Move newsletters and promotional emails to a Newsletter folder. For anything that needs a short reply, draft a response and save it as a draft.
Companion reads each email, applies labels, moves newsletters, and creates draft replies — without you opening your browser once.
You review the drafts, approve the ones that look right, and send. The reading, sorting, and writing happened automatically.
What it costs
Processing 50 emails with Claude Haiku via OpenRouter costs roughly $0.008 — less than a cent. A full month of daily triage, 5 days a week, runs about $0.15–0.25 total.
Compare that to: email management tools like Superhuman start at $30/month. Clean Email is $10/month. With Companion BYOK, you pay for tokens used — nothing else.
Going further
Once you have the basics working, you can add more to the prompt:
Set reminders: "Flag any email that needs a response by Friday and add a reminder to my calendar"
Summarize long threads: "Summarize the last 10 emails in the thread with [name] so I know what's been decided"
Combine with Calendar: "Find any meeting requests in my inbox from today and create calendar events for them"
Draft in your tone: "Reply to any emails asking about pricing with a message in a friendly but professional tone, explaining that we offer BYOK pricing starting from free"
Each of these is one sentence. Companion handles the multi-step execution across your Gmail and Calendar without you switching tabs.
Achmad Bifari is Creative Designer and Social Manager at Companion. He builds tutorials and runs @companionbyaios.