Financial models for
technology decisions
Interactive calculators built for CXOs and their teams. No login. No vendor affiliation. Change any input and the model recalculates instantly.
AI–Human Balance Calculator
Should we cut headcount, and what is the payback on the AI investment? Computes decision-ready answers from your assumptions and your data. Five strategies compared side by side — no AI, cut plan, keep everyone, grow, full automation — on value delivered, cost, profit, payback, annualized return, and the one-time cost to reverse a layoff. Six example scenarios calibrated to published cases: Klarna's support automation and 2025 reversal, Georgia State's chatbot randomized trial, the GitHub Copilot and METR developer trials. Every input tagged measured, judgment, or assumed. One-click PDF for board presentation. Excel version by email.
Workforce Economics · Payback & Reversal Cost · Board-Ready PDFCloud vs. On-Premises Cost Calculator
8-year NPV comparison with crossover year detection. Models workload growth, cloud discount tiers, hardware refresh cycles, staffing costs, and depreciation tax shield. Three preloaded scenarios.
Infrastructure · NPV · Crossover AnalysisAI GPU Infrastructure Calculator
Cloud vs. on-premises GPU economics. H100/A100/L40S/A10G pricing. Training vs. inference workload split. Utilization break-even analysis. Power cost with PUE. MLOps staffing.
GPU Economics · Training vs. InferenceEnterprise Token Economics Calculator
Model LLM consumption at organizational scale. Seven canonical workload profiles — IDE assist, agentic coding, CS policy lookup, research, data agents, and more. Heavy-tail user distribution with Pareto visualization. Governance-lever sensitivity: per-user caps, Opus→Sonnet routing, agent timeouts, and agentic intensity stress-testing. Full sourcing on every default.
Token Economics · Heavy-Tail Distribution · Governance LeversCost Per Prediction (CPP) Calculator
Decompose the unit economics of a single AI inference. Three deployment modes — self-hosted GPU, cloud GPU rental, public API — with crossover breakeven analysis between them. Energy decomposition (GPU draw, server overhead, PUE-implied cooling), hardware amortization curve, log-log scalability chart showing where one mode beats another. Sensitivity tornado on electricity, PUE, utilization, and capex. Step-by-step worked example with side-by-side run comparison. Full sourcing on every default.
Unit Economics · Breakeven Analysis · Energy DecompositionMulti-Cloud CapEx Comparison Calculator
Compare 3-year TCO across AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud for the same workload. Commitment-strategy mix — on-demand, 1-year reserved, 3-year reserved, spot — applied uniformly for fair comparison. Per-vendor pricing cards seeded with verified Q2 2026 list rates and editable to your negotiated quote. Six Decision Context flags that reshape the verdict for what price alone cannot answer: Microsoft-stack alignment, existing committed spend, compliance gates, vendor-locked services, multi-cloud mandates, and data gravity.
Multi-Cloud TCO · Commitment Strategy · Decision ContextNeoCloud Sourcing & Fit Calculator
Decide whether you need dedicated NeoCloud GPU capacity — and then which provider fits. Stage one prices the same demand five ways (hyperscaler baseline, serverless, on-demand, reserved-at-peak, and a blended reserve-base-plus-burst portfolio) and finds the reserve-vs-burst utilization breakeven. Stage two ranks CoreWeave, Nebius, Lambda, Crusoe, IREN, and RunPod on a weighted ten-criterion matrix where counterparty financial durability is weighted automatically by commitment term. Full sourcing on every default.
Sourcing Decision · Reserve-vs-Burst Breakeven · Counterparty RiskFive tiers of AI adoption, one financial model per tier. The framing essay is published; the calculators are in development.
The Five-Tier AI Decision Taxonomy
What "going AI" actually means — five tiers, each with a different cost structure, time-to-value, and competitive moat. The framing essay that anchors every calculator below.
Published · Machine Capital Issue 001 · Mar 5, 2026Tier 1 — Packaged AI: The AI Already In Your Software
True cost of vendor-embedded AI features — Dynamics, Einstein, ServiceNow, Workday. Licensing uplift, integration, change management, and the productivity dip nobody puts in the pitch deck.
Coming SoonTier 2 — Point AI Tools: Departmental Adoption at Speed
The economics of AI sprawl. Subscription proliferation, governance overhead, security review load, and the breach exposure cost when shadow AI meets sensitive data.
Coming SoonTier 3 — Embedded ML: Where Real Competitive Advantage Begins
The full cost of custom ML on proprietary data. Model development, the MLOps tax (3–5× development cost), data pipelines, drift detection, and retraining cycles.
Coming SoonTier 4 — AI-Augmented SDLC: The Fastest ROI Nobody Is Maximizing
Productivity uplift model for GitHub Copilot, Azure Document Intelligence, automated QA, and AI-assisted code review. Adoption-curve adjusted; culture-change investment included.
Coming SoonTier 5 — ML Platform Capability: The Long Game
The CapEx case for owned AI infrastructure. H100 cluster economics, multi-year talent commitment, model refresh cycles. Build this only if your data flywheel is real.
Coming SoonComing in Issue 002: Buy vs. Build Economics — a cross-tier TCO calculator covering all five tiers, with time-to-value curves and a calculator view per tier.
All tools use standard financial modeling conventions: straight-line depreciation, compound growth, after-tax NPV discounted at WACC. Cloud pricing sourced from AWS/Azure/GCP public rate cards. GPU hardware costs from Dell/Supermicro published SKUs. Every formula is visible in the tool. These are starting points for analysis, not substitutes for vendor quotes and CFO review.
Questions on methodology or custom scenarios: contact us.