I’ve spent $328 on AI tokens this month.
I know that because I went back and looked. I wasn’t tracking it in real time — I was too busy building things to notice the bill going up.
Four projects. A camera app that transforms photos using Gemini vision. A trading bot I ran live until the market taught me that paper fills and real fills are completely different animals. A system that faxes doctors to retrieve your own medical records and then runs AI analysis on what comes back. A Shopify theme I keep redesigning because the cart drawer still looks wrong and that bothers me more than I’d like to admit.
None of it is live. None of it has a launch date. One of them might turn into something. Most won’t.
The part I keep coming back to: I’m not frustrated. Not even a little. I keep skipping the shipping part because nothing has grabbed me hard enough to care about finishing it. That’s not a bug. I think that’s just what the learning phase actually feels like.
The trading bot taught me that live fills are a different world than paper trades. The medical records thing introduced me to HIPAA compliance and BAAs — annoying but real. AIery taught me that Gemini can read a scene and transform it into something genuinely strange if you let it. The Shopify theme is still teaching me I have too many opinions about cart UX.
$328 for all that. I’ve paid more for worse.
The idea that grabs me hard enough to actually ship hasn’t shown up yet. Maybe it’s hiding inside one of these four, in a form I haven’t seen. Maybe it’s something completely different. I don’t know. I’m keeping the tabs open.
It’s probably fine.