New startup ideas · AI for people who run the AI themselves · Skills, not services
startup concept
Tokentab
Per-skill cost, routing and drift telemetry for the person who runs AI all day
A local telemetry layer for heavy individual users: it meters which installed skills and MCP servers burn tokens, routes each skill to the cheapest model that passes the user's own quality bar, and alerts when a model update changes a skill's behavior.
- Software subscription
- Consumer
- Rides '$200-a-month seats for heavy users'
0
similar startups, last 2 years (8 all-time)
yes
8 matching federal grants and programs
Direction supported by government programs and grants
Test it before you build it
$300 · 3 weeks · 30 prospects
For $300 and 3 weeks, prove that Claude Max subscribers who hit rate limits will put down $49 pre-orders for cross-assistant metering when free tools already exist.
Riskiest assumption · A Claude Max subscriber who complains about rate limits will pay a third party $49 today for metering and routing, even though free tools like ccusage exist and Anthropic has every incentive to ship a native per-skill cost dashboard.
1Focus group: who and where
An individual US developer or power user paying $100 to $200 a month for Claude Max, running 20 or more skills and MCP servers across Claude Code and Cursor, who hit rate limits at least twice last month and has posted a usage screenshot or complaint about it.
where to find 30 · r/ClaudeAI rate-limit and usage-cap complaint threads (community), the ccusage GitHub repo's issue authors and stargazers, a self-selected list of exactly the people who already meter their Claude spend (list), and Hacker News threads on Claude pricing plus AI Tinkerers meetups (channel and event).
2Sell first, build later
Founding access to a local-first meter that ranks what every installed skill and MCP server cost you last week, routes each skill to the cheapest model that passes your bar, and alerts on behavior drift, shipping to the first cohort 30 days after pre-orders close; your logs never leave your machine.
the ask · $49 refundable pre-order locking a $10 per month founding price for year one, or $99 prepaid for the full first year
a real yes · A real yes is a completed $49 or $99 card payment; upvotes, GitHub stars, waitlist emails without a card, and 'I'd pay for this' comments do not count.
3Small experiments
The first one attacks the riskiest assumption; each ends with a number that says whether to run the next.
1. Ranked cost report pre-order page
$150 · 10 days
Export the founder's own week of logs with ccusage, publish an honest breakdown titled 'What my 30 skills actually cost last week, ranked' and end it with a link to a pre-order page: $49 refundable, locks a $10 a month founding price for year one, local-first meter plus routing and drift alerts shipping in 30 days. Post it to r/ClaudeAI and Hacker News as a writeup, not an ad.
keep going if · 15 pre-orders, or 3% of the first 500 unique visitors converting to a paid pre-order
2. Direct outreach to meterers
$50 · 10 days
DM or email 30 people pulled from ccusage issues and r/ClaudeAI limit threads, referencing the specific complaint or issue they wrote, and offer the founding pre-order directly. Founder sends every message personally, 10 a day for 3 days.
keep going if · 6 of 30 contacted users complete the $49 pre-order
3. Annual price ceiling test
$100 · 7 days
Show half the outreach list a second option at checkout: $99 prepaid for the full first year instead of the $49 reservation. Count which option paying users choose and whether the annual option converts at all.
keep going if · At least 5% of the annual-offer group prepays $99, showing the demand is worth real money rather than reservation-sized curiosity
4Collect a deposit up front
Tesla took $1,000 refundable reservations for the Model 3 and $100 for the Cybertruck before building either: the deposit is the measurement, not the revenue.
$49
per prospect, refundable
how · A $49 refundable pre-order taken by card at checkout on the landing page, the natural consumer instrument for someone who already pays Anthropic $200 a month by card; no calls or signatures, the payment itself is the vote. set up: Stripe Checkout ↗
what it reserves · A slot in the first cohort at the 30-day ship date and the founding price of $10 a month locked for the first 12 months, half the planned $20 tier
refund · Refunded in full anytime before first launch and for 14 days after, one click, no questions.
target · 20 pre-orders across the page and direct outreach within 21 days
Go: build it if
20 or more paid pre-orders in 21 days with at least a 3% visitor-to-pre-order rate, and at least 3 buyers taking the $99 annual option.
Kill: stop if
Fewer than 8 pre-orders after 500 unique visitors and 30 personal DMs, or a pre-order rate under 1%; that means the complainers treat ccusage and native usage views as enough and vendor dashboards will finish the job.
5 Scripts to run itoutreach message, landing copy, deposit terms · click to open
outreach message
Saw your issue on ccusage about tracking cost per project; I hit the same wall on Max, so I built a ranked table of what my 30 skills and MCP servers actually burned last week, then routing rules for the two worst offenders. I'm turning it into a local-first tool: per-skill cost, cheapest-model routing, drift alerts, your logs stay on your machine. Founding pre-order is $49, refundable, and locks $10 a month for year one. Want the breakdown writeup, or 20 minutes to compare bills?
landing page
See what every skill costs, then route it cheaper $49 refundable pre-order locks $10 a month for year one, ships in 30 days Reserve your founding slot
deposit terms
Your $49 reserves a first-cohort slot, shipping 30 days after the founding round closes, and locks your price at $10 a month for the first year instead of $20. Everything runs locally; your logs never touch our servers. Full refund with one click anytime before launch and for 14 days after.
Would you run this test?
One tap. The yes-share feeds the Demand pillar of this idea's score; nobody sees who answered.
Budgets are out-of-pocket estimates for a team of one to three, US market. Size the deposit to the deal, and check the terms before taking money in a regulated line.
Scorecard
Ranked against every idea in the catalog: trend, demand and 100x potential from the corpus, competition relative to the other ideas. A generated concept has no judges or swipes yet, so its pillars use the data signals only.
55
Idea Score, 0-100 · raw 34.2 x 1.61
Open
competition: more crowded than 12% of ideas · headwind x0.94
+3.8
government priorities, secondary (30 matching grants)
Trend
18
Is the wave forming now? 2025-26 entrants vs 2023-24, rounds since 2025, the sector's live-batch direction, the 2026 trend analyst.
- Entrants 2025-26 vs 2023-24 (similar companies)3
- Rounds announced 2025+ in the sector0
- Sector direction (live batch)50
Demand
48
Does anyone want it? YC's current RFS, companies already paid for something similar, the operator judge, founders' yes-rate in decks, readers who would run the test.
- YC asks for it (current RFS: idea / sector)30
- Someone already pays (similar companies, recent / all-time)67
100x potential
40
Can it return a fund? The venture judge (double weight), market-size and moat axes, neighbours still alive, the technologist judge.
- Neighbours still alive40
Score = 100 x cbrt(Trend x Demand x 100x) x (1 - 0.5 x crowding) + government bonus (max 5), calibrated so the 95th-percentile idea scores 90 (order never changes). A geometric mean: a weak pillar cannot be papered over. Percentiles are among the 382 ideas in the catalog; the terms matched were per-skill, cost, routing, drift, telemetry, local, heavy, individual.
The concept in full
- What
- A local telemetry layer for heavy individual users: it meters which installed skills and MCP servers burn tokens, routes each skill to the cheapest model that passes the user's own quality bar, and alerts when a model update changes a skill's behavior. The user owns the logs; nothing routes through a vendor's cloud by default. In the first hour a user connects their assistant, sees a ranked table of what last week actually cost per skill, and turns on routing rules for the two worst offenders.
- Grounded in (2025-2026 signals)
- 'Anthropic launched Claude Max on April 9, 2025 at $100 and $200 a month (5x and 20x the Pro limits)'; OpenAI's $200 ChatGPT Pro opened the tier in December 2024, but the Max launch and the June 2026 40-product skill ecosystem are the 2025-2026 base. Woz (yc W25): 'Claude Code plugin that reduces token consumption and cost by 50%' shows the pain is real and funded.
- What it rides
- Rides '$200-a-month seats for heavy users': Claude Max (April 9, 2025, $100 and $200 tiers) created a population whose personal AI spend is large enough to meter, route and defend.
- Why now
- Since April 9, 2025 individuals pay $100 to $200 a month for usage-capped seats while installing skills from an ecosystem that reached about 40 host products by June 2026; a W25 YC company (Woz) already sells 50% token reduction for one host, and nobody meters across all of them.
- Wedge: first customer and entry point
- First customer: a Claude Max subscriber who hits rate limits weekly. Entry point: a free local meter that shows cost per skill, with routing and drift alerts behind a $20 a month tier, distributed through the communities where Max users compare bills.
- Closest real companies, as the generator saw them
- Woz (yc W25) compresses token usage inside Claude Code specifically; Tokentab measures and routes across every assistant and skill the user runs, and adds behavior-drift alerts Woz does not attempt.
- Main risk
- Assistant vendors have every incentive to ship native per-skill cost dashboards, since usage anxiety threatens their own $200 tier.
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Public money in this direction
US federal grants and open opportunities matched to the concept's terms.
NIH / NIDDK · SBIR phase II · $1M
NIH / NIDDK · SBIR phase II · $1M
NIH / NINDS · SBIR phase II · $1M
NIH / NIMHD · SBIR phase I · $307K
National Science Foundation · I-Corps · $50K
National Science Foundation · I-Corps · $50K
NIH / NHLBI · SBIR phase I · $550K
- I-Corps: Translation Potential of a Scalable Sensor Fusion for Critical Infrastructure Drone Defenseaward
National Science Foundation · I-Corps · $50K
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Fictional concept generated 2026-08-26 by claude-fable-5 from the collection's brief and MarkosWeb data. Treat it as a research prompt, not a plan.