Economico for AI startups
Margin for AI startups with moving model costs
Plans, prepaid credits, and token costs on one ledger, so you know margin per customer even as inference prices move. Run by your AI agent.
The week inference gets more expensive, can you still tell if you're profitable?
Your provider changes token pricing on a Tuesday. Your Pro plan sells for a fixed price and bundles a fixed credit allotment — that number didn't move. The cost of serving those credits just did. So the honest answer to "are we still break-even on Pro?" is a shrug and a spreadsheet you haven't rebuilt since the last price change. One founder put the squeeze plainly: "credits just expired and we're not yet break-even." When your revenue is credits and your cost is tokens, and the token side moves weekly, margin per plan is exactly the number you can't see when you most need it.
Credits are revenue; tokens are cost; put them on one ledger and the guess disappears
The reason margin is hard isn't the math — it's that the two halves live in different places. Credits get sold in your billing tool; token bills arrive from your model provider; nobody keeps them on the same books. Economico does. Subscription revenue and the credits customers buy are recorded distinctly, so you can see what's recurring versus what's consumption. Your model-provider bills post as cost of revenue, tagged by model, so the cost of serving each customer is visible next to the revenue it earned. Same ledger, same period — margin per plan becomes a figure your agent reads off the books instead of one you reconstruct after the price changed.
Prepaid credits sit as deferred revenue until they're actually used
Plans, credits, and the costs behind them, all in one place.
- Monthly plans that bundle a credit allotment.
- Prepaid credit top-ups, parked as deferred revenue and recognized as they're consumed.
- Usage and token metering underneath the credits.
- Model-inference and hosting costs tracked as cost of revenue.
Both revenue streams, booked
Subscription revenue and the credits customers buy are recorded distinctly, so you can see what's recurring and what's consumption.
Inference as cost of revenue
Your model-provider bills are recorded as cost of revenue, tagged by model, so the cost of serving each customer is visible.
Credits as deferred revenue
Credit top-ups are parked as deferred revenue and recognized as they're consumed — the correct treatment, automatically.
Profit you can read
With credit revenue and inference cost on the same ledger, your agent tells you the gross margin on each plan — even the week prices moved.
An AI startup's first quarter · in journal entries
Credits in, tokens out — margin you can read.
Scroll through Brightforge AI's first quarter — plans and credit packs on the revenue side, inference bills on the other, margin visible the whole way.
Incorporate and raise
Selene and Matias found Brightforge and close the YC standard deal. Half a million in — none of it revenue.
4 tool calls
Economicocreate_share_class✓- Economicoissue_shares✓
- Economicorecord_safe✓
- Economicorecord_safe✓
The cost side arrives first
OpenAI for inference, LangSmith for observability — the vendor contracts are already in the inbox.
4 tool calls
Gmailsearch_gmail_messages✓- Gmailread_gmail_message✓
- Economicocreate_party✓
- Economicocreate_party✓
Plan plus credits, billed and paid
Fern Logistics takes the AI Workflow plan with a credit pack — $3,200, collected within two weeks.
3 tool calls
- Economicocreate_invoice✓
- Economicosend_invoice✓
- Economicorecord_payment✓
The token bills land
OpenAI $1,450 and LangSmith $399, charged to the card. Revenue minus the tokens that produced it: real margin.
4 tool calls
- Gmailsearch_gmail_messages✓
- Gmailread_gmail_message✓
- Economicoreceive_bill✓
- Economicoreceive_bill✓
February: growth goes red
A second customer, a token overage — and a $5,500 prompt-engineering bill that outruns them both.
2 tool calls
- Economicoget_income_statement✓
- Economicoget_balance_sheet✓
The quarter closes in the black
Three customers, token prices that moved twice — and margin per plan readable the whole way.
2 tool calls
- Economicoget_income_statement✓
- Economicosummarize_revenue✓
Ask whether each plan still clears its cost
Put Pine Street Agency on the $25/month Pro plan with 100 monthly credits.
Record this month's $92,000 model-inference bill as cost of revenue.
What's my gross margin per plan after inference and hosting costs?
What you'll use
The money loop, tuned for ai startups.
Get started
The finance team you don't have to hire.
Hand your agent the setup guide and it walks through the rest — real books from day one, no dashboard, no finance hire.