This article offers a critique of Southern urbanism’s revisionist propositions of precarity and informality. It does so through the lens of the extractivist economization of precarious living in Naples in the platform-mediated tourism industry. Empirically, the article focuses on a local variant of slum tourism in Naples, investigating the trajectory of a highly celebrated local social startup that offers guided tours of the so-called bassi, the precarious, street-front housing units in the historical neighbourhoods of the city. Conceptually, the article puts forward the notion of ‘startup precarity’, indicating not only the subsumption of the precarity of urban living into the value-extractive machinery of the platform-mediated tourism industry, but also the precarious status of the startup enterprise itself. The article closes with a discussion on the need to critically reflect on the risks involved in the representation, in Southern urbanism literature and beyond, of precarity and informality as promised engines of agency, empowerment and resilience at a time of socially extractivist platform capitalism.