The Study · a directional estimator
The MRR screenshot is the most shared number in indie AI and the least useful. Revenue is what they pay you. Income is what is left after the model bill, the card fees, the refunds, the tax you are only holding, and the people who quietly leave. Put your numbers in. See the real one. It is the math from the economics piece, made clickable.
Your numbers
Monthly price
What one customer pays you per month.
$
Paying customers
How many are subscribed right now.
Model you build on
Sets a rough blended token price. Edit the number below if you know your real blend.
Blended token price
Auto-set by your model. Directional, last set Jun 2026.
$/ M tok
Tokens per user / month
Millions of tokens an average user burns.
M tok
Monthly churn
Share of customers who leave each month.
%
Sales on international cards
Higher card fees plus currency conversion.
%
Sales tax / VAT you remit
Set 0 if it is added on top and is not your liability.
%
The screenshot, minus everything
Gross MRR $10,000
You keep $3,260
That is 33% of the number you would screenshot.
Gross revenueprice × paying customers $10,000
Token billyour metered cost of goods − $5,000
Card feesprocessing, international, conversion − $540
Failed paymentsexpired and declined cards, no dunning − $900
Refunds and disputesreversed sales keep their fee, chargebacks − $300
Tax you remitflows through, flows back out − $0
What you actually keep $3,260
Per customer, you keep $6.52 of the $20.00 they pay. At 6.1% monthly churn, you replace about 31 customers a month just to stand still.
Your token cost is above your price. A user this heavy costs you more than they pay. A flat fee on a metered cost only works if you cap the heavy tail with rate limits.
These are starting points from the research, not your receipts. Change any of them to your real number, that is the point.
The token bill is the margin you do not have.
Mature SaaS runs at 70 to 80% gross margin because hosting amortizes toward zero. AI does the opposite: every query is metered, so inference becomes the dominant cost at scale. Industry AI gross margins sit near 52%, not 80%.
Cheap and self-serve is where churn is worst.
Products under $25 a month churn around 6.1% monthly, roughly half the base in a year. Over $250 a month, retention jumps near 70%. For most solo AI products the move is up-market, not more users.
The cheapest income is the income you already earned.
Failed and declined cards are 20 to 40% of all churn, and around 9% of MRR can simply fail to collect. Dunning, the automated retries and card-update nudges, claws it back with zero new customers.
Numbers are directional, not financial advice.
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