Break-Even Calculator — Units and Revenue to Cover Your Costs

Real-world use cases

• Set a launch sales target for a $30 product

  You're launching a product at $30 with $10 of variable cost per unit (materials plus payment fees) against $6,000 of monthly fixed costs. Enter those three numbers and the tool returns a $20 contribution margin, 300 break-even units, and $9,000 of break-even revenue. Now you have a concrete monthly target the whole team can rally around: cross 300 units and the month is in the black. Share the URL with your co-founder so you're both looking at the same plan instead of arguing from memory.

• Price-check a SaaS subscription against its support cost

  A SaaS plan sells for $25 a month and costs you about $3 per customer in hosting and support. Tap the SaaS preset, adjust to your real fixed costs — say $8,000 a month for the team and tooling — and the $22 margin gives a break-even of roughly 364 paying customers. If that number feels out of reach for the quarter, you immediately know the lever is fixed costs or price, not wishful thinking about conversion.

• Decide whether a $4,000 profit goal is realistic this month

  Your shop breaks even at 300 units, but you want $4,000 of profit on top. Enter 4000 in the target-profit field and the tool shows you need 500 units total, 200 more than break-even. Hold that against your actual traffic and you have an honest answer: if you sell 350 a month, the $4,000 goal needs either a price bump or a cost cut, and the profit ladder shows exactly how the bottom line moves at 350, 400, and 500 units.

• Test whether a price cut still pencils out

  A competitor undercuts you and you're tempted to drop the price from $30 to $24. Variable cost stays at $10, so the margin falls from $20 to $14 and break-even jumps from 300 units to 429. Seeing the new break-even before you change the sticker tells you whether the extra volume from a lower price can realistically cover the gap, or whether you'd be selling more and earning less.

• Brief an investor or your boss with one defensible number

  Instead of "we think we'll be profitable soon," you can say "at our current $20 contribution margin we break even at 300 units a month, and we're tracking 240." That's a number anyone can audit: it ties fixed costs, price, and unit economics into a single threshold. Copy the result text straight into the deck or the email, or send the share link so they can change an assumption and see the threshold move themselves.

Common pitfalls

• Mixing time periods. If fixed costs are monthly but you secretly think of the price as an annual figure, the break-even units are meaningless. Keep fixed costs, price, variable cost, and target profit all on the same window (all monthly or all annual) and read the result in that same period.

• Putting fixed costs into the variable-cost field, or vice versa. Variable cost is per single unit (what one more sale costs you); fixed cost is the total that doesn't change with volume. Swapping them makes the margin and break-even point wildly wrong — a $10 per-unit cost is not the same as $10,000 of monthly overhead.

• Forgetting that break-even is not a profit goal. Hitting the break-even volume means you've covered your costs and earned exactly zero. To actually make money you need to clear it, which is why the target-profit field exists — use it to set a real goal rather than treating break-even as the finish line.

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