Free Lesson
AI Cost Engineering: Unit Economics at 10x Traffic
30 min
Sep 22, 2026 1:30 PM
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What you'll learn
Decompose cost per request into three terms
Split every request into prompt, completion and cache-miss cost, so you know which term actually moves the bill.
Find the traffic where gross margin inverts
Push the model to 10x and watch the point where each new user starts costing more than they bring in.
Test how hard your cache hit rate is working
Run the sensitivity. A few points of cache hit rate can decide whether a feature is viable at all.
Leave with a wired unit economics spreadsheet
Built live from provider pricing pages and your own cache-hit metrics, sensitivities already wired in.
Why this topic matters
Most AI features are priced on a demo. Then traffic multiplies, and the per-request cost that looked like a rounding error becomes the reason the feature gets cut. Knowing that number before finance does is a staff habit. We build the model live from provider pricing pages and real cache-hit metrics, push it to 10x, and find where gross margin inverts. You leave with the spreadsheet.
