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FinOpsLLM Cost per Customer: Find the Users Costing More Than They Pay
Your average cost per user hides the outliers. A few heavy users or one expensive feature can wipe out the margin on everyone else.
Tag every request with customer and feature, compare cost per customer with revenue per customer, and cap or reprice the outliers.
Tag every request
Attach customer ID, feature and environment to each call, in your logs or gateway metadata. Without tags, you can only see the total.
Three numbers to track
- Cost per customer per month, against what they pay.
- Cost per feature, to see which features earn their tokens.
- The top 1% of customers by cost, and what they do differently.
What to do about outliers
- Usage caps or fair-use limits on plans.
- Cheaper models for heavy, simple usage.
- Usage-based pricing above a threshold.
- Caching for repeated work by the same customer.
Estimate yours with the AI cost per user calculator and the gross margin calculator.
Frequently asked questions
How do I calculate LLM cost per customer?
Tag each request with a customer ID, sum the token cost per customer over a month, and compare it with that customer's revenue.
What if one customer costs more than they pay?
Add a usage cap, move their heavy simple work to a cheaper model, or move them to usage-based pricing.
Want us to find your 20%?
Book a free 15-minute API cost teardown. Bring last month's provider usage and we'll show you your biggest waste and the first fix we'd ship.
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