Unit Economics
Cost per request, per tenant, per transaction — the actionable number.
4 to work through
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intermediate
A delivery marketplace's infrastructure cost per order is falling while total cost rises. Is that good, and what should the unit metric actually be?
2 min answer -
advanced
A database vendor removes its free tier to control cost. How should a platform team model the true cost of serving many tiny tenants, and which architectural choices change the economics?
3 min answer -
advanced Multiple choice
A travel marketplace in the mould of Expedia serves roughly 1000 searches per confirmed booking. Every search fans out to supplier APIs that charge per call and enforce contractual call quotas. Infrastructure cost per booking is climbing while cost per search falls. Which unit metric should drive architectural decisions?
2 min answer -
advanced
An AI inference platform's margin depends on GPU utilisation. Which levers actually change unit economics, and in what order?
2 min answer
4 terms in this topic
Fully-Loaded Tenant Cost
The total cost of serving one tenant including the per-tenant floors that do not scale with usage - infrastructure minimums, control-plane overhead, …
metricFunnel-Stage Cost Ratio
The cost incurred by all the attempts that precede one revenue event, expressed per revenue event, which exposes the case where making each attempt c…
metricUnit Economics
Infrastructure cost expressed per unit of business value delivered, which reveals efficiency trends that absolute spend cannot.
metricUnit Economics of a System
The cost to serve one unit of business value — a customer, an order, a request — which determines whether a system's economics improve or worsen with…
Neighbouring topics
Cost & FinOps
General material on the economics of an architecture.
Total Cost of Ownership
Lifetime cost including people, operations, upgrades and exit.
Cloud Pricing Models
On-demand, committed and spot, and the crossover arithmetic.
Reserved & Committed Capacity
Committing the baseline, laddering terms, and expiry as a silent failure.
Spot & Interruptible Capacity
Deep discounts for work that can be interrupted and resumed.
Cost per Request
Fully-loaded per-unit cost, including the lines usually left out.
Storage Costs
Tiering, lifecycle policies, retrieval charges and minimum durations.
Network & Egress Costs
Cross-zone and cross-region transfer that appears on no diagram.
Compute Optimisation
Instance families, utilisation, and architecture that wastes less.
Rightsizing
Matching provisioned resources to observed demand rather than to a guess.
Cost Allocation
Tagging enforced at provisioning, and apportioning shared costs.
Showback & Chargeback
Making teams see, or own, the cost of what they run.
Architecture Cost Modelling
Pricing a design before building it, at expected and at ten times volume.
Cost vs Reliability
Each nine costing an order of magnitude, and pricing the failure instead.
Observability Cost
Telemetry bills, cardinality control and retention tiering.
Licence & Vendor Costs
Per-core, per-seat and per-environment terms that shape designs.
FinOps Practice
Inform, optimise, operate — and cost as a design-review criterion.
Waste Elimination
Idle environments, orphaned volumes, forgotten instances, dead data.
Cost Governance
Budgets, anomaly alerts, quotas and preventive policy.