An AI-run YouTube channel for $5.47 a month: the pipeline, the bill, and what broke
Jon's automated Roblox channel went from 1 to 114 subscribers in five months. The AI that writes and watches costs $0.47 a month. Here is the whole pipeline, the real numbers, and every bug.
Before this firm existed, Jon built an automated YouTube channel: Roblox gameplay with AI commentary. It isn’t part of the firm’s budget, but it’s the most complete AI pipeline either of us has run in production, so here is all of it, with real numbers.
We’re not naming the channel yet. That reveal is coming in a future issue of the newsletter.
The numbers
| Subscribers | 114 (started at 1 in May 2026) |
| Views, last 28 days | 12.5K |
| Watch time, last 28 days | ~36 hours |
| Views per Short | ~800–1,300 |
| Revenue | $0 (not eligible for YouTube’s Partner Program yet) |
The bill
| Tool | What it does | Monthly cost |
|---|---|---|
| Claude API (Sonnet 4.6) | Watches the footage, picks highlights, writes the commentary | $0.47 (last 30 days) |
| ElevenLabs Starter (affiliate link) | Turns the script into a voiceover | $5.00 |
| ChatGPT Plus | Thumbnails (a handful a month) | not counted* |
| FFmpeg, Python, OBS | Recording, editing, assembly | $0 |
| YouTube API | Uploading and analytics | $0 |
| Total | $5.47/month |
*Jon already pays for ChatGPT Plus ($20/month) for other things and uses it for a handful of thumbnails a month, so we don’t charge it to the channel. If you’d need a subscription just for thumbnails, add it.
The Claude API ran on about six days in the last month, roughly $0.07 per session. Each session turns into one long video and three Shorts, so the AI writing costs about two cents per video. The voice costs ten times more than the brain.
The human part
Jon records about 5 minutes of gameplay, a couple of times a week. Almost everything after that is automated. Add roughly 15 minutes a week (Jon’s estimate) for typing in the game name, starting the run, making thumbnails and checking the uploads.
How the pipeline works
- Record. Jon plays and records with OBS.
- Watch. Claude Vision looks at frames from the footage and figures out what’s happening and which moments are worth keeping.
- Write. Claude writes first-person commentary for the long video and a separate script for each Short.
- Voice. ElevenLabs reads the scripts.
- Edit. FFmpeg cuts a highlight reel, mixes in one of seven rotating music tracks, and keeps the game audio quietly underneath.
- Package. The pipeline writes titles, descriptions and tags, including the game’s name. Thumbnails are the one manual step: Jon screenshots the published video and its description, asks ChatGPT to turn them into an image prompt, then has ChatGPT generate the thumbnail from that prompt.
- Publish. It uploads one long video plus three Shorts to YouTube on a schedule. TikTok cross-posting is built but stuck in sandbox mode until TikTok approves the app.
It’s a set of Python scripts on a home PC, one per step, run by an orchestrator.
What broke
This is the part most “I automated a YouTube channel” posts leave out.
- Silent Shorts. A file-format mismatch (.mp3 vs .aac) meant Shorts uploaded with no music.
- The game audio got dropped. Fixed by mixing the game’s sound back in at low volume, under the voice and music.
- The voiceover made things up. The AI narrated events that never happened in the clip. Fix: each Short’s script is now written from three real frames of its own segment, not from a summary of the whole video.
- Wrong game names. When the AI guessed the game, the guesses leaked into titles and tags, hedges like “likely” and “or similar” included. Now Jon types the game name in a text file, guesses that look unsure fall back to “Roblox”, and the file clears after each run so an old name can’t leak into the next video.
- Cut-off thumbnail text. Labels got chopped mid-word (“TAP FOR FR”). Now they’re capped at 18 characters and trimmed by whole words.
What’s working
Shorts carry the channel. They pull roughly 800–1,300 views each, while the long videos do far less. The plan now: Shorts first, two or three a day, series formats (one game for a week, numbered parts), and linking every Short to its long video.
What we’d tell someone building this
- The AI brain is the cheap part. Writing and video analysis cost cents. Voice, thumbnails and your attention are the real costs.
- Check the output by hand at first. Silent Shorts, invented narration and wrong game names all looked fine to the pipeline.
- Ground the AI in real frames. Asking it to describe a clip it can’t see is how you get made-up commentary.
- Read the platform rules before you scale. YouTube’s rules on repetitive, mass-produced content matter more once you’re uploading daily.
We’ll report this channel’s numbers again as they change, including the first dollar if it ever comes.