Bluevine cost report - the expenses nobody budgets, and the salary that covers them

Bluevine asked 776 US owners what the first year actually costs. The gap is not in the big line items but in the ones that never make it into the spreadsheet.

- 51% missed at least one expense entirely; the most forgotten are equipment and space (37%), business insurance (35%), licences and permits (34%)
- nearly 2 in 3 cut or killed their own pay in year one, and 37% went a stretch with no paycheck at all
- only 56% of those expecting profit within 6-12 months got it, and 79% wish they had saved more before starting

Read it as a floor for how wrong a first budget goes, not as a SaaS benchmark: the sample is small business owners at $50k-$5M revenue, not venture-backed startups.

https://www.bluevine.com/blog/cost-of-starting-business-report

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