Unit Economics

Go beyond total spend and understand what each customer, transaction, or API call actually costs you.

Overview

Unit Economics connects cloud costs to business metrics so you can track cost per customer, cost per transaction, cost per API call, or any other unit that matters to your business.

Defining Metrics

A metric is the denominator in your unit cost calculation. Each metric has:

  • Name — a human-readable label (e.g. “Monthly Active Users”)
  • Unit — what is being counted (e.g. users, requests, orders)
  • Source — where the value comes from (manual entry or API)

Updating Values

Metric values can be updated manually through the dashboard or programmatically via the CostBeacon API. Automated updates keep your unit cost calculations current without manual intervention.

How Unit Cost is Calculated

Unit cost is calculated by dividing total spend for a given scope by the metric value for the same period:

Unit Cost = Total Spend / Metric Value

For example, if your monthly cloud spend is $10,000 and you served 50,000 customers, your cost per customer is $0.20.

Using in Reports

Select the Unit Economics report type to generate reports that show unit cost trends over time. These reports help finance and engineering teams track efficiency improvements and forecast future costs based on growth projections.