Work Out Your Breakeven At The Price You're Charging
A price that looks profitable can still lose money if the volume isn't there. This takes your selling price, the cost of each unit, and your fixed monthly costs, then prints the margin per unit, the number of units you must sell to break even, and a table showing profit at a spread of volumes. Local only; nothing leaves the tab.
- Card
- Margin per unit, breakeven volume, and profit by volume
- local
- What it replaces
- Setting a price by comparison and hoping
- $0.00
- Input
- Price, unit cost, fixed costs, and current volume
- no card
- Output
- A breakeven volume and a profit table
- recomputed
What you pay otherwise
| Route | What you get | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Accountant's hour | Arithmetic you can run in a minute | $100+ |
| Undercutting a competitor | A lower price with an unchanged breakeven | more volume |
| Discounting to move stock | Cutting margin without checking the breakeven | the profit |
| This page | The breakeven, in units you can sell | $0 |
The workflow
Count every cost that varies with a unit
Materials, packaging, payment processing, postage, and the platform fee. Missing the payment fee alone understates your unit cost by two or three percent, which moves the breakeven noticeably at scale.
Use fixed costs you pay whether you sell or not
Rent, subscriptions, insurance, and your own salary if you draw one. If you leave your own time out, the breakeven describes a business that pays everyone except you.
Read the margin percentage and the breakeven together
A high margin percentage with a low unit margin still needs a lot of volume. The two numbers answer different questions, and pricing decisions go wrong when only one is looked at.
Test the discount before you offer it
A 10% discount reduces margin per unit but leaves fixed costs untouched, so the breakeven rises. Run the discounted price through the calculator first — the extra units required is the real cost of the promotion.
Worked example
Sample: price 42.00, unit cost 17.50, fixed 2,400/month Margin per unit 24.50 (58.3%) Breakeven 98 units a month At 120 sold profit 540.00 At 80 sold loss -440.00 Uploaded nothing — computed in the tab
Numbers above are sample data produced by the tool's own pre-loaded example, run in the browser — not averages or measured benchmarks.
What breaks this
Omitting payment processing and postage understates unit cost and produces an optimistic breakeven. Leaving your own time out of fixed costs describes a business that pays everyone but you. Discounting without re-running the breakeven raises the volume you need while lowering the margin you earn on it.
Try it now
A 42.00 price with a 98-unit breakeven is loaded. Cut the price to 36 and the breakeven climbs to 130 units — 32 more sales for the same profit.
Open the calculator →Go deeper: the printable card
The calculation is free forever. The $4 one-time tier adds:
- Printable card — the margin and breakeven on one sheet — estimate: ~8 min saved rebuilding it when costs move.
- Saved pricing models — keep up to 8 models in this browser — estimate: ~12 min saved comparing price points.
- Discount scenarios — the breakeven at several discounts side by side — estimate: ~15 min saved running each by hand.