Author
Diego Aguirre is BudgetForge's case-study analyst. He walks the math on real SaaS pricing rebuilds, lead with the number, walk the receipts, name the trade-off.
A 1,500 customer SaaS shipped AI features and watched gross margin fall from 81% to 47%. We walk three pricing ladders and the COGS math that got it back to 73% in 8 weeks.
The sticker price per token is the smallest line in your LLM bill. Once you add retries, embeddings, vector reads, orchestration, and the platform margin, a "simple" agent workflow lands around $0.42 per run — roughly 4× the raw model cost. This breakdown shows where the money actually goes and which three levers cut a workflow bill the fastest without touching quality.
