Comparison
Cost per requestvsUnit economics
Cost per request
you finally attribute spend per feature and find that a summariser almost nobody uses is a third of the bill.
The unit-economics number: input tokens times input rate plus output tokens times output rate, aggregated per feature and per customer. Instrument it from day one; per-feature cost attribution is what tells you which product surface is quietly burning money.
Full entry →Unit economics
the bill went up thirty percent and the cost per order fell, which is the only version of that sentence worth reporting.
Expressing infrastructure cost per unit of business value — per order, per tenant, per thousand requests — rather than in absolute currency. It is the only framing in which a growing bill can be evaluated, because absolute cost conflates growth with waste. It also gives engineering a target that survives a good quarter, which a spend cap does not.
Full entry →