[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"glossary-unit-economics::en":3,"gloss-cluster-unit-economics::en":26,"gloss-next-unit-economics::en":9},{"slug":4,"category":5,"name":6,"definition":7,"meta_desc":8,"faq":9,"schema_markup":9,"related":10},"unit-economics","saas","Unit Economics","Unit economics is the practice of reducing a business to one repeatable unit and asking two questions about it: what does this unit earn, and what does it cost to serve? In classic subscription software the unit is a customer. Acquisition cost sits on one side, lifetime gross profit on the other, and the relationship between them tells you whether growth compounds or simply converts funding into logos.\n\nAI products did not abandon that view, they added a layer underneath it. Because serving costs real money per action, a second unit now sits below the customer: the task. A conversation answered, a document processed, a ticket resolved. Two accounts on the same plan can be a good deal and a bad one at the same time, and nothing at the customer level will show you which is which, because the plan price is identical for both.\n\nGetting the cost side right means counting the whole served unit rather than the happy path. A finished task usually involves a retrieval step, one or more tool calls, retries after a malformed response, and sometimes a second model checking the first — every one of those is billable work that produced no separate output. Human review belongs in the same column whenever a person signs off before the result reaches the customer, as does the infrastructure that exists only because the feature does.\n\nThe revenue side is less interesting and more often wrong. Use recognised revenue net of discounts and service credits rather than list price, and keep one-off implementation fees out of the monthly unit unless you amortise them deliberately. A number that flatters itself is worse than no number at all, because it will be used to justify shipping the workflow that loses money.\n\nWhat the exercise buys you is a set of decisions you can defend. Whether a feature belongs on the free tier. Whether it needs a cheaper model on the first pass. Whether caching is a convenience or the only thing keeping the margin positive. Whether a segment should be priced differently or politely declined. All of those follow from cost per task and cost per customer, and none of them can be read off a blended gross margin.\n\nThe failure mode is averaging. A product-wide average is a mixture, and mixtures hide their extremes: the one workflow whose cost per task exceeds the revenue it generates disappears into a healthy-looking aggregate for exactly as long as the rest of the product carries it. Compute the numbers per workflow and per customer segment, refresh them when model prices or prompt sizes move, and treat a large shift as a pricing decision rather than an engineering footnote.","Unit economics asks what one unit earns and what it costs to serve. In AI products the unit moved from the customer down to the task, and the answer moved with it.",null,[11,14,17,20,23],{"slug":12,"name":13},"cac","Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)",{"slug":15,"name":16},"cost-per-task","Cost per Task",{"slug":18,"name":19},"gross-margin","Gross Margin",{"slug":21,"name":22},"ltv","Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)",{"slug":24,"name":25},"payback-period","CAC Payback Period",[27,31,35,38,41,44,47,51,54,57,60,61],{"slug":28,"category":5,"name":29,"updated_at":30},"activation","Activation","2026-08-24T02:46:36+00:00",{"slug":32,"category":5,"name":33,"updated_at":34},"aha-moment","Aha Moment","2026-08-24T02:46:37+00:00",{"slug":36,"category":5,"name":37,"updated_at":34},"annual-contract-value","Annual Contract Value (ACV)",{"slug":39,"category":5,"name":40,"updated_at":30},"api-first","API-First",{"slug":42,"category":5,"name":43,"updated_at":30},"arpa","Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA)",{"slug":45,"category":5,"name":46,"updated_at":30},"arr","Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)",{"slug":48,"category":5,"name":49,"updated_at":50},"auto-renewal-clause","Auto-Renewal Clause","2026-08-24T02:46:38+00:00",{"slug":52,"category":5,"name":53,"updated_at":50},"build-vs-buy","Build vs. Buy",{"slug":55,"category":5,"name":56,"updated_at":34},"burn-multiple","Burn Multiple",{"slug":58,"category":5,"name":59,"updated_at":50},"burn-rate","Burn Rate",{"slug":12,"category":5,"name":13,"updated_at":30},{"slug":62,"category":5,"name":63,"updated_at":30},"cdn","Content Delivery Network (CDN)"]