AI Startup Costs: My $5,756 Credit Card Bill, Before the Big Bills

Name: AI Startup Costs: My $5,756 Credit Card Bill, Before the Big Bills
Uploaded: 2026-10-05T06:34:11.191Z
Duration: 87 s
Channel: Austin Starks
Description: My September AI startup costs: a $5,756 credit-card bill for market data, AI providers and daily life, before rent, mortgage and other major monthly bills.

I walk through my September 2026 credit-card spending while building NexusTrade: $5,756.45 in total, including $2,130.72 for Massive.com market data, $317.79 for OpenRouter, and separate OpenAI, DeepSeek and MotherDuck charges. The receipt also includes flights, everyday spending and a few payments I cannot confidently identify.

The credit-card total excludes major monthly bills. The animated estimates show $2,500 rent, $6,000 mortgage, a $300 car note and roughly $1,000 in other bills, totaling about $9,800 outside the card statement. This is my personal spending breakdown, not a universal startup budget.

Austin Starks

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Transcript

0:00I'm an unemployed software engineer and I spent nearly $6,000 last month.

0:05This is not include rent, my mortgage, my car note, my student loans, or any really major bills.

0:12This is solely my credit card statement. Here's what I spent all of that money on.

0:18Item number one is Massive.com. I primarily used that for my historical options data

0:23and other source of stock data including news and intraday stock data.

0:29Number two is OpenRouter.

0:30This is basically an LLM gateway.

0:32So you can imagine it,

0:33instead of sending my request directly to OpenAI,

0:36I send it to OpenRouter,

0:38then they send it to OpenAI Anthropic, Google,

0:41or open-source providers like Moonshot or DeepSeek.

0:44Then we have the rest of the providers. I spent $100 on OpenAI

0:48$53 on DeepSeek $100 on MotherDuck, which I just retired

0:53I spent $243 on plane tickets. That's the small cost of a long-distance relationship

1:00All these payments here. I honestly don't really know what these are. Maybe this is Higgsfield or something? I don't even know.

1:06$50 on TikTok?

1:08Shh.

1:09You got me.

1:11And some other small things. Overall, all I do all day long is write code and build out AI agents.

1:18So good thing about starting your own business. This is a peek into what your expenses is going to look like.

1:25Follow for more.

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