The Palette · a free, directional estimator
AI margin calculator
What you actually keep from your MRR.
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
Each preset fills every field. The model buttons set only the token price. Edit anything and it becomes your own scenario.
The screenshot, minus everything
That is 33% of the number you would screenshot.
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.
A concrete read of the defaults: a $20 product with 500 paying customers grosses $10,000 a month. The token bill takes $5,000, card fees about $540, failed payments $900, and refunds $300, which leaves $3,260. That is 33% of the number you would screenshot, the shape of a flat price sitting on a metered cost.
What the math assumes
These are starting points from the research, not your receipts. Change any of them to your real number, that is the point.
- % of gross treated as uncollected, the midpoint of common dunning-loss estimates. Baremetrics
- % of gross since a reversed sale keeps its processing fee and a chargeback carries a flat cost. Stripe
- Card fees 2.9% plus $0.30 domestic, rising toward 5.4% on the international share you set, plus a small conversion slice. Computed, not editable. Stripe
- Token cost your tokens per user times the blended price you set. Real bills move with the input and output mix and with caching, and inference keeps falling, so treat it as directional, not a quote. Epoch AI
- One month a snapshot of your current base. It is built to show the gap between gross and kept, not to file your taxes.
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%. In the defaults here, a $20 product with 500 users carries a $5,000 monthly inference bill, half of the $10,000 it grosses.
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. At the 6.1% default, that is about 31 customers you replace every month just to hold the line.
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. In the defaults, roughly $900 of that $10,000 walks out on failed cards before anyone cancels.
Numbers are directional, not financial advice.