Unit economics

Measure efficiency, not just spend.

A growing cloud bill isn’t a problem when every dollar drives more revenue. CarnotCloud connects cost to the metrics your business runs on — customers, orders, API calls, streams — so you can prove efficiency is improving even as you scale.

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Cloud cost per 1,000 ordersUnit cost · trailing 12 months

−36%

Cost per 1K orders

$3.06

↓ 36% YoY

Cost per active customer

$0.41

↓ 18% YoY

Cloud COGS / revenue

9.8%

↓ 3.1 pts

Any metric

from your warehouse, product analytics or API

Cloud COGS

and gross-margin impact, tracked automatically

36 months

of history to benchmark trends

Capabilities

What you get with Unit Economics

Bring your business metrics

Import customers, transactions, active users or any KPI from Snowflake, BigQuery, Datadog, product analytics or a simple API call.

Cost per unit, per team

Track cost per customer, per order or per 1,000 requests — for the whole company or for each product and team.

Cloud COGS & margin

Separate COGS from R&D spend and report cloud cost as a percentage of revenue — the metric boards and investors ask for.

Customer profitability

Allocate multi-tenant costs to customers to find the accounts, tiers and features that erode margin.

Efficiency targets

Set unit-cost goals per team and watch progress in the Carnot Efficiency Score.

Board-ready reporting

Scheduled executive summaries that explain trends in plain English, with drill-down for the curious.

Prove the cloud is getting more efficient

Answer “is our cloud spend healthy?” with one chart

Absolute spend always goes up in a growing business. Unit cost tells the real story. CarnotCloud trends your cost per unit by product and team, and alerts you when efficiency starts to slip.

Custom unit metrics with daily refresh
Unit-cost anomaly detection
Forecast unit cost at future scale
Benchmarks against your own historical baseline

Cloud cost per 1,000 ordersUnit cost · trailing 12 months

−36%

Cost per 1K orders

$3.06

↓ 36% YoY

Cost per active customer

$0.41

↓ 18% YoY

Cloud COGS / revenue

9.8%

↓ 3.1 pts

Pricing & packaging insight

Know what each customer really costs to serve

Multi-tenant platforms hide expensive customers. Allocate shared infrastructure by usage to see cost-to-serve per account and per plan — and price accordingly.

Tenant-level allocation for shared clusters and databases
Cost-to-serve by plan, region and segment
Margin outlier detection
Export to your BI or revenue systems

Cost by business unitIncludes shared costs, support & credits · September

100% allocated

Virtual tagging rules

IF account ∈ prod-payments-* OR tag:service ~ "pay*" → BU = PaymentsSPLIT shared EKS + support fees BY cpu-hours → all BUs

+6 pts gross margin on AI features

“Our AI bill was a black box. Now we see cost per customer for every model and feature, and we’ve added six points of gross margin by routing work to the right model.”

Arjun S.CTO, AI-native SaaS platform

FAQ

Unit Economics: common questions

Where do business metrics come from?

Connect a warehouse table (Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, Redshift), a Datadog or Prometheus metric, a product-analytics export, or push values to our API. Most teams set up their first unit metric in under an hour.

Can different teams use different unit metrics?

Yes. Each product or team can track the metric that matters to it — cost per stream, per order, per active user — while leadership sees a roll-up.

How is this different from showback?

Showback tells a team what it spent. Unit economics tells it whether that spend is efficient, by relating cost to the value it produces.

Keep exploring

See Unit Economics on your own data.

Book a 30-minute demo tailored to your stack, or start with a free savings assessment — read-only, no agents, no obligation.

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