Your unit economics
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Volume tier suggestions
| Tier | Units | Price/unit | Discount |
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Find the right price per unit for your API, AI tool, or metered SaaS product.
| Tier | Units | Price/unit | Discount |
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This calculator converts your cost per unit — an API call, GB of egress, 1,000 tokens, or any metered resource — into a list price that hits your target gross margin after accounting for a free tier. It multiplies expected monthly volume by cost to show total COGS, subtracts the free-tier units you give away at your own expense, and spreads that giveaway across billable units so the margin you see is the margin you actually earn. This matters for API and cloud products because the underlying cost is variable: inference, bandwidth, and compute scale with usage, so a price set from intuition rather than unit COGS can look profitable in aggregate while losing money on every heavy user.
Traditional SaaS targets 75–85% gross margin, but API and AI products that pay per inference call or per GB of egress commonly run 40–70% because COGS scales directly with usage. Pick a target you can defend with real infrastructure bills, then check that the resulting price is still competitive; if it is not, the fix is usually lower unit cost, not a lower margin.
Free-tier units are pure cost with no revenue, so their COGS has to be recovered from the units customers do pay for. If a typical account uses 100,000 units and the first 10,000 are free, you are charging for 90,000 units but paying to serve 100,000, which raises the break-even price by roughly 11% before any margin is added.
Per-unit pricing is simplest and matches cost most closely, but it produces unpredictable bills that enterprise buyers dislike. Volume tiers with declining rates reward growth while keeping margin positive at each step, and a committed monthly minimum covers fixed costs such as reserved capacity and support that per-unit pricing alone does not recover.