Playcode School / AI cost to serve
Know what one customer costs you.
An AI feature costs you money every time a customer uses it. Add up what one customer costs in a month before you decide what to charge.
Three costs make the total: the AI model, the runtime that hosts your app, and any other service each customer uses. The calculator below adds them up with every assumption in view.
Every request has a price.
Software is usually built once and sold many times. An AI feature adds a cost every time it runs: you pay the model provider for each request, whatever the customer pays you.
Martin Casado and Matt Bornstein describe this difference in "The New Business of AI" (2020), and advise founders to track down their real variable costs instead of letting them hide in research and development.
Example: two recruiters pay you the same monthly price. One asks for a summary of every application she receives, the other only of her shortlist. The first can cost you several times as much in model use.
Three costs make up one customer's month.
Work out each one for a single customer over a single month, then add them up.
- Model use
- What the AI provider charges for that customer's requests. Providers count text in tokens, pieces of words, and charge one price for the tokens you send and usually a higher one for the tokens the model writes back. Example: each summary sends an application, your instructions and the template, and gets one page back.
- Runtime
- What it costs to run the app: the server, the database and the stored files. You pay it once a month, and all your customers share it. Example: the month's hosting bill, divided by the recruiters who pay you.
- Other services
- Anything else you pay for each customer's use. Example: the emails the app sends, the files it keeps and a service that reads documents.
Work out your cost to serve.
Change any number and the result follows. Every default is an assumption: the two model prices are Anthropic's list prices on its "Pricing" page (2026), each with the day it was read; the other numbers are an example for the recruiter. Replace each one with your own figure.
This calculator does not read your Playcode account, and its defaults are not Playcode prices. Enter every amount in US dollars, the currency of the list prices.
Cost to serve one customer for a month
Model use + runtime share + other services
$0.96 + $2.00 + $0.50 = $3.46
Check your price against your heaviest customers.
Model use grows with every request, so a customer who uses the feature twice as often costs twice as much. Set your price with your heaviest customers in mind, not only the typical one.
The runtime works the other way: the more customers share it, the less each one carries. With only a few customers, it can be most of the cost.
Replace each assumption with a measurement.
Once people use the product, count the requests each customer makes in a month, and read the tokens of real requests from your provider's usage records. Put those numbers in place of the example.
If the cost is too high, change one thing at a time, such as a cheaper model or shorter instructions, and check that the results still pass your brief.