calculate-startup-unit-economics

calculate-startup-unit-economics is a skill for Claude Code from jeffreytse/grimoire-core. It costs 32 tokens per session (1,167 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A calculation of how profitable each customer, sale, or other business unit is. It can include customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value, payback time, and contribution margin.

In plain words
What is it for?
Checking startup profitability, comparing customer segments, measuring acquisition spending, and deciding whether a business model can scale.
Why use it?
It shows whether gaining more customers creates value or increases losses, even when overall revenue is growing.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the grimoire-business plugin — 145 skills shipped together

Good fit Checking startup profitability, comparing customer segments, measuring acquisition spending, and deciding whether a business model can scale.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/jeffreytse/grimoire-core/calculate-startup-unit-economics
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add jeffreytse/grimoire-core --skill calculate-startup-unit-economics
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jeffreytse/grimoire-core

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install grimoire-business, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 145 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

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README.md
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Your own site
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Per session 32 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,167 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00032 $0.01167
Opus 5 $0.00016 $0.00583
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00233
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00117

Measured 9d ago against content hash e82a337df258, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

calculate-startup-unit-economics scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 9d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/business/entrepreneurship/skills/calculate-startup-unit-economics/SKILL.md · 72 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 72 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Calculate Startup Unit Economics

Compute and interpret the unit-level profitability metrics that determine whether a business can scale sustainably.

Why This Is Best Practice

Adopted by: a16z, Bessemer Venture Partners, Sequoia, SaaS founders, and marketplace operators Impact: Bessemer's State of the Cloud report shows LTV:CAC ratio is the single metric most correlated with Series A/B funding success. Businesses with LTV:CAC > 3x are 4x more likely to reach $10M ARR than those below 1x. Skok found that SaaS companies that track payback period reduce churn by identifying at-risk cohorts 60 days earlier. Why best: Unit economics reveal whether each incremental customer creates or destroys value, independent of growth rate. Unprofitable unit economics at small scale never improve at large scale — they accelerate losses.

Sources: Skok "SaaS Metrics 2.0" (2012, For Entrepreneurs); Bessemer Venture Partners "State of the Cloud" (2023); a16z "16 Startup Metrics" (2015)

Steps

  1. Define the "unit" — clarify what one unit is: one customer, one subscriber, one transaction, one driver, one seat. All calculations depend on consistent unit definition.

  2. Calculate Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) — divide total sales and marketing spend in a period by the number of new customers acquired in that period. Use fully-loaded costs: salaries, tools, ad spend, events.

    CAC = Total S&M Spend / New Customers Acquired

  3. Calculate Average Revenue Per Unit (ARPU) — compute monthly recurring revenue (MRR) or transaction revenue per unit. For multi-tier products, calculate blended ARPU across all tiers.

  4. Calculate Gross Margin per unit — subtract cost of goods sold (COGS) per customer from ARPU. COGS includes hosting, support, customer success, and third-party fees attributable to serving that customer.

    Gross Margin % = (ARPU − COGS per customer) / ARPU

  5. Estimate Customer Lifetime — use one of: (1) 1 ÷ monthly churn rate, (2) cohort analysis of actual retention curves, or (3) contract length for B2B SaaS. Cohort analysis is most accurate.

Read the full file on GitHub · 72 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 9d ago First seen · 72 lines · 32 tokens per session scan A e82a337df258

Subscribe to this mod's changes

calculate-startup-unit-economics is a skill published in the GitHub repository jeffreytse/grimoire-core (4 stars, last pushed 24d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 32 tokens to every session and 1,167 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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