Calculate feature cost to serve
Calculate fully loaded feature cost and CVaR cost per verified adopted account across aligned build-amortization, run, support, usage, and adoption scenarios.
What it's for
Shows which capabilities remain expensive to operate per genuinely adopting customer after build, infrastructure, usage, and support costs are reconciled.
What you give it
Inputs split into evidence read from your connected systems, calibration your team owns, and numerical controls that affect precision but never the result's meaning.
| Field | Type | Role | Required |
|---|---|---|---|
| features | array of objects (7 fields) | Evidence | Yes |
| max_detail_rows | integer ≥ 1, ≤ 500 | Numerical control | Optional |
| maximum_expected_cost_per_adopted_account | any | Your calibration | Optional |
| scenario_probabilities | array of number ≥ 2 items | Evidence | Yes |
| tail_probability | number ≥ 0.001, ≤ 0.5 | Your calibration | Optional |
Each features
record
| Field | Type | Required |
|---|---|---|
| adopted_accounts_scenarios | array of number (≥ 2 items) | Yes |
| amortized_build_cost_per_period | number (≥ 0) | Yes |
| fixed_run_cost_scenarios | array of number (≥ 2 items) | Yes |
| id | string (non-empty) | Yes |
| support_cost_scenarios | array of number (≥ 2 items) | Yes |
| usage_volume_scenarios | array of number (≥ 2 items) | Yes |
| variable_cost_per_usage_unit | number (≥ 0) | Yes |
{
"features": [
{
"adopted_accounts_scenarios": [
10,
20,
30
],
"amortized_build_cost_per_period": 100,
"fixed_run_cost_scenarios": [
50,
60,
70
],
"id": "analytics",
"support_cost_scenarios": [
20,
30,
40
],
"usage_volume_scenarios": [
100,
200,
300
],
"variable_cost_per_usage_unit": 0.1
}
],
"maximum_expected_cost_per_adopted_account": 20,
"scenario_probabilities": [
0.2,
0.5,
0.3
]
} What you get back
This is the actual output of running the example above — computed by the same function the platform calls, not an illustration.
{
"assumptions": [
"Build amortization, fixed run, variable usage, and support cost share one accounting period, currency, capitalization/allocation policy, and feature boundary without omitted shared cost.",
"Adopted accounts represent verified business use rather than license assignment, feature exposure, commits, tickets, or raw event volume.",
"Cost per adopted account is undefined in zero-adoption scenarios; their probability remains explicit rather than silently dividing by a small constant."
],
"configuration": {
"maximum_expected_cost_per_adopted_account": 20,
"scenario_count": 3,
"tail_probability": 0.1
},
"decision": "feature_cost_to_serve_within_threshold",
"feature_diagnostics": [
{
"cvar_cost_per_adopted_account": 18,
"exceeds_cost_threshold": false,
"expected_adopted_accounts": 21,
"expected_cost_per_adopted_account": 11.25,
"expected_total_cost": 213,
"feature_id": "analytics",
"probability_zero_adopted_accounts": 0
}
],
"method": "fully_loaded_feature_cost_to_serve_scenarios_v1",
"summary": {
"feature_count": 1,
"portfolio_cvar_cost_per_adopted_account": 18,
"portfolio_expected_adopted_accounts": 21,
"portfolio_expected_cost_per_adopted_account": 11.25,
"portfolio_expected_total_cost": 213,
"portfolio_probability_zero_adopted_accounts": 0
},
"truncated_feature_count": 0
} How it works
Decision analysis — Turn uncertainty, cost and risk appetite into a defensible choice, with the reasoning left inspectable.
- 1 Freeze the feature/accounting boundary, amortized build cost, fixed run and support paths, variable usage economics, and verified adopted-account paths over one period and currency.
- 2 Calculate scenario total cost and cost per adopted account only where adoption is positive, retaining zero-adoption probability explicitly, then aggregate portfolio unit cost and CVaR.
- 3 Expose threshold breaches and reconcile shared-cost allocation and adoption evidence before comparing features or feeding product/pricing decisions.
Before you trust it
Every tool in the catalog ships with the conditions under which its answer is meaningful — and the conditions under which it should abstain instead of guessing.
Assumptions & guardrails
- Actions, outcomes, utilities, evidence boundaries, uncertainty representation, and accountable ownership match the actual decision.
- Costs are complete and non-overlapping under one capitalization/allocation policy, while adopted accounts reflect verified business use rather than exposure, license assignment, or raw events.
- The result structures a governed choice; it does not replace accountable judgment or authorize action outside the declared decision boundary.
- Cost per adopted account is undefined in zero-adoption states and is not feature value, profitability, or evidence about the people who built or support it.
Minimum evidence
- features: required and organization-defined
- scenario_probabilities: at least 2 rows/items
How to validate it
Validate on future periods or held-out aggregate units, compare with a simple baseline, and require stability across plausible metric definitions and decision thresholds.
Calibrating it to your org
Same for everyone
The mathematical kernel, validation rules, method version, and JSON output semantics are organization-independent; no tenant-trained coefficients or company benchmark is embedded in the function.
Specific to you
- aligned scenario paths for fixed run, support, usage, adopted accounts, and fully loaded feature cost
- feature/account boundary, accounting period/currency, capitalization/amortization, shared allocation, usage unit/rate, adoption event, scenarios/probabilities, tail level, and threshold
Calibration workflow
- 1 Define the management decision, target outcome, aggregate unit, privacy boundary, cadence, and prediction/intervention horizon for this organization.
- 2 Build a tenant-scoped historical cohort using only information available before each prediction or decision; preserve zero periods, censoring, assignment probabilities, and unresolved outcomes when the method requires them.
- 3 Estimate statistical parameters on training history, but obtain costs, utilities, risk tolerance, practical-effect thresholds, capacity, and policy constraints from accountable decision owners.
- 4 Validate on later time windows or held-out aggregate units at the deployment grain, against a simple baseline and the function-specific validation strategy.
- 5 Deploy only if the returned decision clears evidence, overlap, calibration, robustness, and guardrail checks; warning, unsupported, schema-gap, and fallback decisions are abstentions.
- 6 Monitor realized outcomes, data drift, coverage, and decision regret; recalibrate at a governed cadence or after a detected regime/definition change, never merely because a stakeholder dislikes the result.
Call it from your AI
You don't wire up 388 tools in your MCP client. The GitRevio MCP server exposes 18 tools, three of which let an agent search the catalog, read a tool's schema, and run it — so the assistant finds this one on its own.
gitrevio_capabilities_search
{ "q": "calculate fully loaded feature cost and" }
→ finds "calculate_feature_cost_to_serve"
gitrevio_capability_describe
{ "capability_id": "calculate_feature_cost_to_serve" }
→ returns the input schema and agent guidance shown on this page
gitrevio_capability_run
{ "capability_id": "calculate_feature_cost_to_serve", "arguments": { ... } }
→ returns the result shown above Works in Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, Cline, Continue.dev, Goose and Aider. See the MCP server.
Related tools
Construct quality speed cost pareto surface
Construct a stochastic three-dimensional quality, delivery-time, and cost Pareto surface with practical dominance, membership probability, and a transparent maximin navigator.
Forecast support cost to serve
Forecast future support cost and budget-breach probability with a chronological held-out lognormal regression on accounts, supported products, and ticket load.
Audit benefit double counting
Reconcile business-case benefit claims to unique economic source pools and allocation fractions, exposing overallocated sources and claim-level mismatches before portfolio value is aggregated.
Audit cash flow timing consistency
Audit whether economic-event and cash-settlement timing obey governed lag rules across coherent scenarios, quantify the resulting NPV distortion, reconstruct scenario liquidity paths, and separate timing exceptions from liquidity-tail exposure without treating exceptions as wrongdoing.
Audit cost allocation consistency
Audit whether shared engineering, platform, cloud, vendor, or operating cost pools reconcile to source totals and follow their declared pro-rata allocation bases at every target.
Audit cost capitalization sensitivity
Audit whether permitted software-cost capitalization choices change reported project ROI and priority even though scenario cash NPV, downside, and economic rank are unchanged.