Is creating a deck bad for the environment?

The honest, sourced footprint of generating one personalized card deck — energy, carbon and water — how it compares to everyday digital life, and our 1% commitment to permanent carbon removal.

Short answer: creating one personalized deck has a genuinely small footprint — comparable to a few hours of video streaming — and we fund permanent carbon removal on top of that. Here's the honest math, with sources.

What one deck costs the planet

We paint every card with AI, and AI does use energy and water — we don't pretend otherwise. Using the most cautious published estimates, generating a full 78-card deck works out to roughly:

  • ~0.3 kWh of energy — about the same as 4 hours of video streaming.
  • ~130 g of CO₂ — about 90 minutes of scrolling social media, or driving under half a mile.
  • ~1–3 litres of water for data-center cooling and power — a couple of bottles' worth.

Smaller decks (44-card oracle decks, 12-card decks) scale down proportionally.

How we keep it small

  • We never re-paint a card we've already made — only missing cards are generated, and edits touch a single card, not the whole deck.
  • Digital-first — your deck is high-resolution files by default. Paper, ink and shipping (the largest part of any physical product's footprint) only happen if you choose a printed edition.
  • Efficient, modern models on shared cloud infrastructure — and the cost of each card keeps falling as the technology improves.

It's getting lighter every year

This isn't a fixed number — it's a shrinking one. Image models are roughly 10× more energy-efficient than the 2023 benchmarks, electricity grids keep decarbonizing, and data-center water use per unit of energy is falling. The same deck costs a fraction of what it would have two years ago.

We go one step further

On every single order, we direct 1% of our revenue to permanent carbon removal through Stripe Climate. It funds frontier technologies that pull CO₂ out of the atmosphere and lock it away, and 100% of it reaches those projects with no fees taken along the way. We're honest about it: 1% helps grow and scale the carbon-removal industry — we're not claiming each deck is perfectly "carbon neutral" — but it's a real contribution on top of an already small footprint.

See the full breakdown

The complete page, with the methodology and every source (IEA, Hugging Face / MIT, UC Riverside, Berkeley Lab and more), lives at tails-ai.com/environmental-impact.

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