Know What Every Feature Costs with Tirdad
Build a Tirdad cost sheet, connect its charges to product usage, and see revenue, cost, and margin by feature and customer.
Updated 2026-08-14
You sell AI financial reports. Revenue appears in billing, supplier costs appear in four other dashboards, and nobody can answer a simple question: what margin did we make on Noura’s account last month?
Tirdad cost sheets bring the other half of billing into the same model. Plans describe what you charge. A cost sheet describes what it costs you to deliver it. Cost Analytics puts the two together.
Start with the customer action
Noura buys completed reports, not tokens or OCR pages. Use completed report as the common unit for revenue and cost.
That gives every team the same question:
- product decides what counts as a completed report;
- engineering records it through a meter;
- finance adds every cost behind it;
- Tirdad compares the resulting cost with revenue.
Create the cost sheet in Tirdad
Open Product Catalog → Cost Sheets and create a sheet called AI report costs. Its name explains the model to your team; its lookup key gives the model a stable reference.
Now add the costs required to deliver the feature.
Put every cost of the feature in one model.
Create one cost sheet for AI reports, then add the fixed and usage costs required to deliver them.
Model inference
Usage charge · linked to the report meter
Document extraction
Usage charge · linked to the report meter
Storage + delivery
Usage charge · linked to the report meter
Monitoring + operations
Fixed charge · monthly
Tirdad supports two kinds of cost charges:
| Cost charge | Use it for | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Fixed | Cost that repeats with time | SAR 500 monthly monitoring contract |
| Usage-based | Cost that grows with a metered action | SAR 0.22 for every completed report |
Do not force every cost into a per-report estimate. Keep monthly costs fixed and report costs usage-based. The cost sheet preserves both shapes.
Connect cost and revenue with the same meter
The report meter is the join between the two sides of the business. A plan charge uses it to calculate revenue. A cost-sheet charge uses it to calculate cost.
The same report meter connects what you earn with what it costs.
Choose the event carefully. If customers only receive completed reports, meter report.completed, not report.started. Failed attempts may still cost money; include that expected failure cost in the usage charge or represent it with its own metered cost when you need that detail.
The important rule is consistency: the meter, customer, and time window must describe the same activity on both sides.
Add every cost charge once
For our AI report, the cost sheet contains three usage charges and one monthly charge.
Usage turns cost-sheet charges into actual cost.
Model cost
Extraction cost
Storage cost
Fixed monthly cost
Each usage charge can use the same meter but represent a different supplier cost. That keeps the model readable when one supplier changes. Replace the model cost without rewriting the report price or losing the other cost lines.
Review the sheet when any of these change:
- model or supplier rate;
- average document size;
- failure and retry behavior;
- monitoring contract;
- storage policy;
- volume discount.
Read the result in Cost Analytics
Once revenue and costs share the relevant meters, Cost Analytics calculates:
- total revenue;
- total cost;
- margin;
- margin percentage;
- cost breakdown by meter.
Filter the view by feature, customer, or date range. This is where a broad company margin becomes an actionable product decision.
See the customers and features behind the margin.
| Customer | Revenue | Cost | Margin | Margin % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Noura · light | SAR 299 | SAR 5 | + SAR 294 | 98% |
| Omar · expected | SAR 299 | SAR 22.50 | + SAR 276.50 | 92% |
| Lama · full limit | SAR 299 | SAR 50 | + SAR 249 | 83% |
| Rayan · heavy | SAR 459 | SAR 90 | + SAR 369 | 80% |
A blended margin can look healthy while one customer, feature, or supplier quietly loses money. The filtered view tells you whether to change the cost model, allowance, overage price, or supplier.
Use the cost sheet before changing the price
Cost does not tell you what the feature is worth. It tells you whether the current price can sustain the way customers use it.
Before changing a plan, answer four questions in Tirdad:
| Question | Where the answer comes from |
|---|---|
| Which feature creates the cost? | Cost-sheet charge and meter |
| Which customers create most of it? | Cost Analytics by customer |
| What did those customers pay? | Revenue for the same period |
| Is the problem normal or exceptional usage? | Customer and date filters |
Then choose the right response. A supplier change fixes a cost problem. A smaller allowance fixes excessive included usage. Overage fixes heavy usage. A higher plan price only makes sense when the value and market support it.
Put internal costs in Tirdad beside the usage that creates them. Then pricing conversations start with margin you can trace—not a supplier invoice and a guess.