OD
data, kpi & finance

Unit Economics

BYOK Model | FP&A Pre-Read
97.8% gross margin
Zero AI cost of goods sold on our books, by design.
Q1 FY26 · prepared for the board

Present a unit-economics model like an FP&A partner: the assumptions, the sensitivity, and why it scales.

97.8%
Gross Margin · BYOK Model
$0.42 infra cost per seat. $0 AI COGS. Margin holds as usage climbs.
01 / 08
·
the headline answer

The answer,
before
the model.

Every AI design tool carries the same tension: usage grows, and the AI inference bill grows with it. Open Design breaks that link with BYOK — bring your own key.

Under BYOK, model inference is billed straight from the user's own provider account, never resold through our infrastructure. Our own cost per seat is $0.42 a month — storage, sync, relay, nothing more.

The result: gross margin holds at 97.8% whether a seat runs ten generations a month or ten thousand. This deck walks the assumptions, the sensitivity, and the forecast.

Prepared for the board
FP&A · Q1 FY26 · confidential draft
02 / 08
The three cost drivers
unit-economics · driver tree
No. 01
Compute
Zero-Cost
Compute
Model inference runs against the user's own API key. Every token and every generation is billed to their provider account, not ours.
BYOK
$0 AI COGS
No. 02
Infra
Thin-Cloud
Infra
Our infra bill is sync, relay, and storage only — the daemon and agent runtime execute locally on the user's own machine.
Local-first
$0.42 / seat / mo
No. 03
Retention
Compounding
Retention
Design systems and memory accumulate per account, raising switching cost and expansion revenue without raising our marginal cost.
129 design systems
NDR trending up
03 / 08
The Model, Built in Five Lines

How We Get to 98%

i.
Start with list price
$19 per seat per month, mid-market design-tool pricing
$19.00
ii.
Subtract infra COGS
sync, storage, and relay, metered per active seat
-$0.42
iii.
Subtract AI COGS
BYOK routes every inference call to the user's own key
-$0.00
iv.
Land on gross profit
per seat, per month, before sales, support, and marketing
$18.58
v.
Compute the margin
gross profit over revenue, held flat as usage scales
97.8%
05 / 08
The sensitivity, in one line

Usage can grow tenfold and margin does not move — because the AI bill isn't ours.

FP&A
sensitivity analysis · BYOK cost model
06 / 08
The four-quarter forecast
FY26 model · seats × margin
No.
Period
Volume & revenue
Margin
Status
01
Q1 FY26
3,200 seats · $60.8K MRR
97.8%
Actual
02
Q2 FY26
4,900 seats · $93.1K MRR
97.8%
Forecast
03
Q3 FY26
7,400 seats · $140.6K MRR
97.9%
Forecast
04
Q4 FY26
11,000 seats · $209.0K MRR
98.0%
Forecast
05
Downside
5,500 seats · growth cut 25%
97.6%
Stress case
06
Upside
15,000 seats · BYOK adoption up
98.3%
Upside case
07 / 08
·
the recommended move

The move
we recommend.

Hold pricing flat at $19 per seat, lean on BYOK as the retention lever, and let team expansion — not AI resale — drive revenue. The model holds at 97.8% margin through 15,000 seats.

08 / 08