AI unit economics calculator

What it does

A subscription that includes AI has a cost that grows with use. This tool sets that cost against what your customers pay, month by month.

• Your AI features. List each AI feature of your product: the model it calls, what one call sends and returns (input tokens, the part read from or written to the provider's cache, output tokens), and how many times an average active user calls it in a month.
• Your customers and price. Enter your paying customers, the active users each has, and your subscription price — per customer or per user (seat). Add every other monthly cost of running the product as one figure: hosting, support, anything else.
• Heavy users, if you know them. Some users use a product far more than others. Describe yours from your own data: the top share of users, and how many times the average user's calls each of them makes. The tool assumes nothing here; with either field empty it says nothing about heavy users.

It shows the AI cost per active user, per customer and per feature, the AI cost as a share of revenue, the gross margin after AI and your other costs, how many customers it takes to break even, and what a heavy user costs against what one user brings in (with a price per customer and no users per customer, there is no per-user revenue, and the tool says so).

Everything runs in your browser. Nothing you enter is sent anywhere.

How it computes

• One cost engine. Each feature is one cost scenario — one active user's month of its calls — and each call is priced by calculateCost, the function Salyro prices usage with, over Salyro's own price list. The tool adds nothing to the price of a call: a user's month is the price of one call times the calls in it, exactly.
• From a user to the business. A customer's AI cost is a user's times the active users it has; the month's AI cost is a customer's times your customers. Revenue is your price times customers (or times every user, for a per-seat price).
• Share of revenue is the month's AI cost divided by the month's revenue. Gross margin is revenue less AI cost and your other costs, as a share of revenue. Taxes, fees and discounts are not included.
• Break-even is the smallest number of customers whose revenue, less their AI cost, covers your other costs — at the same price and usage. With no other costs, you are in profit from the first customer (or, when a customer pays exactly its AI cost, make neither profit nor loss). When a customer costs more in AI than it pays, every customer adds to the loss; when it pays exactly its AI cost and there are other costs, no number of customers covers them. The tool says which.
• A heavy user is one of the top share you entered, making the multiple you entered of the average user's calls, on every feature. The average still holds for everyone, so the tool checks the description is possible (the heavy users cannot make more calls than all users together) and shows what the other users then average. "Above the 90th percentile" is another way to say "the top 10%".
• Exact arithmetic. Amounts are exact decimals throughout and rounded only for display.

What it does not know

• A model with no price for part of a call is not priced, never $0. The feature says why, and every AI figure is marked partial: it adds up only the features that could be priced. With nothing priced there is no AI cost, no margin and no break-even to show.
• How your usage is distributed. The heavy-user figures are yours. The tool has no distribution of its own, and no default that pretends to be one.
• Your token counts and volumes. They are estimates you enter; your product's logs are the best source for them.
• It prices tokens only: not per-request fees, image or audio pricing a provider bills separately, taxes, credits or committed-use discounts. It does not know your other costs beyond the figure you type.

FAQ

Why is my margin negative?

Revenue does not cover the AI cost and your other costs at this price and usage. The per-feature table shows which feature costs the most; a cheaper model for it, fewer calls, or cached input are the usual levers. The model switch impact tool shows what moving one feature to another model changes.

Why is the heavy user "unknown"?

Because you have not described one yet. Enter both the share of users and their multiple of the average user's calls. The tool will not assume how uneven your usage is.

How do I see what my product really costs once it runs?

Salyro records the cost of every request it routes, per gateway. With one gateway per feature or per environment, the dashboard shows what each actually costs — see attributing cost per feature.

Can I share the numbers?

Yes. The link holds your figures, compressed after the #, which your browser never sends to a server. Feature names are the only text you type, and the share dialog can leave them out.

Sources

Prices come from each provider's pricing page, through Salyro's price list; the page names the revision and the date each was read. Context windows come from the Reference Data listed under the page.