Break-even calculator. With margin of safety.
Enter fixed costs, price, variable cost. Get break-even units, break-even revenue, contribution margin per unit, margin of safety, and days-to-break-even at your order velocity.
Fixed costs, price, variable cost.
BEP, safety, runway.
Break-even isn't a number. It's a runway.
Break-even point is fixed costs divided by contribution margin per unit, where contribution margin per unit is price minus variable cost. Twenty thousand in monthly fixed costs against a product that sells for $80 with $30 of variable cost per unit has a break-even point of 400 units, which translates to $32,000 in revenue. The more useful number is margin of safety: how far above break-even your projected volume actually lands. That number tells you whether the business has cushion or whether one slow month puts it underwater.
Three numbers compound into a runway view. First, break-even units: the order count below which fixed costs are not covered. Second, contribution margin per unit: the profit that each marginal order contributes to covering those fixed costs. Third, days-to-break-even: BEP units divided by current daily order velocity, which tells you roughly when in a given month the store starts earning instead of subsidizing.
The five places break-even math breaks down in practice: underestimated fixed costs (founder salaries left out), variable costs undercounted (shipping, per-click ad spend not allocated), price discounted without recalculating BEP, launches with zero baseline velocity (BEP infinity in day one), and blended CAC rolled into fixed when it should be variable. All five inflate the apparent margin of safety and under-price risk.
Tools in the same cluster: Profit calculator for the after-BEP view. Markup calculator for the pricing lever. CAC payback calculator for the ad-recovery view. AOV calculator for the per-order lever.
Five answers.
What is the break-even point formula?
Break-even point in units equals fixed costs divided by contribution margin per unit, where contribution margin per unit is selling price minus variable cost per unit. Break-even point in revenue equals fixed costs divided by contribution margin ratio, where contribution margin ratio is contribution margin per unit divided by selling price. Example: $20,000 monthly fixed costs, $80 selling price, $30 variable cost per unit. Contribution margin per unit is $50; BEP is 400 units or $32,000 in revenue.
What is margin of safety?
Margin of safety is the percentage by which actual or projected sales exceed break-even sales. If BEP is 400 units and you are projecting 550 units, margin of safety is 150 units or 27 percent. A 20 to 50 percent margin of safety is healthy for most DTC brands; below 10 percent is high-risk because small sales dips push you below break-even; above 50 percent signals either a highly profitable product or under-investment in growth.
What counts as fixed vs. variable cost?
Fixed costs do not change with order volume: rent, salaries, Shopify plan, Klaviyo subscription, insurance, accounting retainer. Variable costs change with each order: cost of goods sold, per-order shipping, payment processing fees, per-order fulfillment labor, per-click ad spend attributed to that order. Blended CAC is a gray zone: it is variable per new customer, but for break-even math most operators treat it as variable (rolled into per-unit cost).
How long until I break even on a product launch?
Days-to-break-even equals break-even units divided by daily order velocity. A product with a 400-unit BEP and a 15-order-per-day velocity breaks even in roughly 27 days. The calculator above computes this against the order velocity you enter. Most DTC launches target 45 to 90 days to break even on launch spend; longer than 120 days signals either under-pricing, over-spending on launch, or a mismatch between product and audience.
Does this calculator save my data?
No. Every value you enter lives in memory for this browser tab only. Nothing is transmitted to a server, stored in a database, or synced. Close the tab and the data is gone. The Copy Results button puts a plain-text summary on your clipboard; that is the only output path.
Thin margin of safety?
Our growth strategy engagements re-cost fixed burden, re-price hero products, and rebuild variable cost allocation against actual shipping and CAC. Written plan in 2 weeks.