Yesterday I stumbled on Thomas Zahil's X post where he shared his monthly cost of living. Someone replied with theirs. Then another person. Then another.
I kept scrolling and genuinely found it interesting. There's something about seeing actual numbers from actual people that feels a little differently compared to the usual "just move to Southeast Asia" advice you see everywhere.
So I opened Claude (Opus 4.6 ofc), started pulling all the responses together, and went down a rabbit hole for a few hours. What started as casual curiosity turned into a proper dataset. So far 62 founders, developers, and digital nomads across 34 countries, all normalized to USD.
I removed outliers, built an interactive breakdown by country, and put everything on a page you can explore yourself.
I call it FounderSpend.
Fair warning: the data is self-reported and crowdsourced, so take individual entries with a grain of salt. Some people include taxes, some don't.
Some track every subscription, others eyeball it. But the patterns that emerge across 62 people are quite interesting already.
I’ll keep adding more founders as they share their numbers on X.
I intentionally tried to filter only “founders” for now. How did I do that? I just pragmatically looked at each person’s X bio and tried to deduct if they seem like an actual founder or not.
Here's what stood out for me so far:
The median is not what you think
Everyone in these circles either talks about living on $800/mo in Bali or burning $5k in San Francisco. The actual median across all 62 people is $1,842/mo. Not extreme in either direction. Just under two grand, living a pretty normal founder life somewhere in the world. I thought it might be a bit higher.
Housing sets the ceiling for everything else
43% of total budget on average. Five people in the dataset pay $0 because they own or live with family. For everyone else, rent is the number that everything else gets squeezed around. One person’s $5,000/mo rent in Switzerland alone is more than the total monthly spend of 80% of people in this dataset.
Southeast Asia is not cheap, it's variable
This is the one that genuinely surprised me. The region gets treated as the obvious budget escape hatch but the spread within it is massive.
Vietnam at $830/mo. Bangkok hitting $4,900+ with someone doing daily delivery and travel. Indonesia ranging from $1,560 upward.
Same region, 6x difference. Location is just the starting point. How you actually choose to live there is the whole equation. Some people seem to like to spend money regardless of the location ;)
AI tools are quietly becoming a real line item
One founder spends $650/mo on ChatGPT plus 12 other AI tools. Others land at $40 to $55. Only 7 out of 62 people even tracked it separately, which means the real number across the full dataset is probably higher. What used to be $0 two years ago is now a fixed cost that, for some people, rivals what they spend on food.
There’s some more interesting data that emerged including a little tool that allows you to see where your budget stacks up against the dataset but for that you got to check it out yourself ↓
P.S: Have any feedback or ideas for the project, DM me.
P.P.S: If your data is in there and you want it removed, just DM me.
