Install CostPad, connect the MCP server, and understand the concepts behind every panel. No accounts required to start.
Three steps from install to your first margin number.
Download CostPad for macOS. It runs fully offline — your model never leaves your machine.
Download CostPadEnter your fixed, per-user, and per-unit costs, then define your pricing tiers. CostPad ships with sensible defaults you can edit in place.
Set how many users sit in each tier. The blended economics panel shows your real margin — not a best-case single-tier number.
CostPad comes in three forms. Pick the one that fits your workflow.
The full simulator plus the built-in local MCP server. Recommended for most people.
Get itHeadless server for AI assistants — no GUI required.
CostPad separates cost of goods sold into three kinds so your per-user math stays honest as you scale.
Flat monthly costs that don't move with usage — hosting, databases, base subscriptions.
Costs that grow with headcount — seats, email delivery, support tooling.
Metered costs — API calls, LLM tokens, storage, anything billed by quantity.
Tag each item as Infrastructure, API & Services, Tooling, Support, or Other for a color-coded breakdown.
Tiers define what you sell; the user mix defines how many sit in each. Keeping them separate lets you re-run the same pricing against different audience shapes.
A name, a monthly price, and the usage it allows (units per user). Color-coded for the charts.
The count of users in each tier. Revenue and margin update the moment you change a number.
Rather than reporting your best tier, CostPad blends every tier against your user mix into one set of numbers: COGS per subscriber, fees per subscriber, net revenue, and gross margin. Payment fees and free-tier drag are included so the margin is the one you'll actually see.
Project forward from churn, growth rate, and new subscribers per month to see MRR, ARR, break-even month, and payback period. The "Monthly at Scale" panel models economics across subscriber milestones with a configurable paid-to-free ratio.
A product can hold many dashboards. Each dashboard is a free-form grid of panels you arrange yourself — drag to move, resize from any edge. Product data (costs, tiers, mix) is shared; dashboards only own their layout.
See the dashboard builderCostPad runs a local Model Context Protocol server so assistants like Claude and Cursor can read your model and run scenarios in their own flow. The full tool list, parameters, and return shapes are in the MCP reference.
Open the MCP referenceOn the desktop and web apps, your model is stored locally in your browser or app storage. There are no accounts and no telemetry. The optional Cloud plan adds cross-device sync and multiple products — everything else stays on your machine.
Install CostPad and model your pricing in minutes.