Andrew Yang sees startup gold rush in cutting everyday costs

Andrew Yang thinks the next startup boom will be built on a deceptively simple promise: give people back some of the money they already spend. Housing, food, wireless, education, fuel, transportation and media are on his list of things Americans overpay for, and he is betting that founders can win by charging less, not by finding new ways to extract margin.

The affordability thesis

Yang’s pitch is bigger than a single product category. He says artificial intelligence could compress wages and displace workers, which would make lower living costs more valuable just as paychecks come under pressure. That is why he sees affordability itself as a business model, not just a side effect of clever software.

The logic borrows from a familiar playbook: strip out unnecessary middlemen, show the price plainly, and compete on trust. Yang said he was inspired by Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs, which offers medications at transparent prices and says it cuts out middlemen. In Yang’s framing, the same principle could be applied to recurring household expenses that feel fixed but are often full of friction, markups and hidden fees.

Wireless is the cleanest test case

Yang has already tested the idea in wireless with Noble Mobile, the company he launched in September 2024 and rolled out publicly in 2025. Noble says it offers a $50-a-month unlimited 5G plan on T-Mobile’s network, with cash back for unused data and no hidden fees. That makes the service easy to compare against the standard carrier experience, where bills often creep upward through device charges, add-ons and rate changes.

The category is also unusually well suited to a price-led challenge because it is measurable and monthly. J.D. Power’s 2025 wireless studies treat mobile network operators and mobile virtual network operators as distinct consumer categories, and one of those studies was based on responses from 17,331 customers. Industry and consumer references still cite an average monthly phone bill of about $141, which leaves obvious room for a lower-cost alternative if customers are willing to trade some brand familiarity for savings.

Noble’s model suggests where startups can realistically make an impact. Wireless is standardized, recurring and easy to unbundle, so a lean MVNO can compete by buying network access and packaging it more efficiently. A startup does not need to reinvent the network to make the bill smaller, which is exactly why telecom is one of the few household categories where “cheaper through tech” can work at scale.

Housing is the hardest frontier

Housing tells a different story. The Census Bureau said renters paid a median $1,413 a month in 2020-2024, about $100 more than in the prior five-year period, which shows how quickly rents have climbed even before utilities are added in. Harvard’s 2025 State of the Nation’s Housing report said half of all renters in 2023, a record 22.6 million, were cost-burdened, meaning they spent 30% or more of income on housing and utilities.

Those numbers point to a structural problem, not just a pricing problem. Housing is shaped by land use rules, local zoning, financing costs, construction labor, materials and the slow pace of new supply. A startup can streamline searches, underwriting or payment collection, but it cannot on its own create enough apartments in places where supply is constrained and prices are set by scarce inventory.

That is why housing is the most difficult part of Yang’s thesis. Startup tools may make the process smoother, but they do not change the fact that the core cost driver is physical supply. If affordability is the goal, policy still matters most in this market, because the biggest savings come from building more homes and reducing the barriers that keep them scarce.

Food costs expose the limits of tech alone

Groceries sit somewhere between wireless and housing. An AP-NORC poll found that about half of Americans say groceries are a major source of stress, while 33% say they are a minor source of stress. The same polling line also showed how strained family budgets have become: 19% of those concerned have used buy-now-pay-later services for groceries at some point.

That is a demand signal, but it is not proof that a startup can solve the problem. Grocery prices are driven by commodity costs, labor, energy, transportation and concentration in processing and distribution. Tech can reduce waste, improve ordering, or surface discounts, but it is unlikely to bring national food inflation to heel without competition policy, supply-side reform and better pricing power for consumers.

Where the startup model fits, and where it does not

Yang’s broader list includes education, fuel, transportation and media, and some of those categories may be more open to disruption than housing. Subscriptions and digital services can be simplified, and transparent pricing can expose the hidden cost structure of products people renew every month. But the closer an expense gets to land, labor and physical infrastructure, the harder it is for a startup to make a meaningful dent without broader policy changes.

That is the central question behind Yang’s pitch. Startups can absolutely find pockets of waste, and in wireless they already have a credible opening. Yet the biggest household bills are not all equally vulnerable to innovation, and the affordability crisis will not be solved by code alone. The winners will be the businesses that lower friction where they can, and the policymakers who make the underlying markets more competitive where they cannot.