Benchmark

AI Margin Compression Benchmark: Unit Economics

How AI API costs compress SaaS gross margins. CostMyAI benchmarks AI infrastructure unit economics for B2B and consumer AI products, showing the margin profile at different usage volumes and model choices.

Margin compression by scenario

  • $49/mo AI SaaS with GPT-4o mini: AI cost is 3-8% of revenue at 1,000 MAU
  • $49/mo AI SaaS with GPT-4o: AI cost is 25-50% of revenue at 1,000 MAU — margin destruction
  • $99/mo B2B tool with Claude 3.5 Sonnet, heavy usage: AI cost can exceed revenue at low ACV
  • The break-even: a $49/mo product needs more than $3 gross margin per user after AI costs to be viable at scale

The fix is almost never "switch providers." It is routing workloads by task type so that the 70-80% of queries that do not need frontier-model quality run on economy models.

Analyze my margin risk