Staging environment

AI Cost Engineering: Unit Economics at 10x Traffic

Hosted by Ehsan Gazar

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Production-Ready Systems with LLMs and Agents: An Intensive for Engineers
Ehsan Gazar
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What you'll learn

Decompose cost per request into three terms

Split every request into prompt, completion and cache-miss cost, so you know which term actually moves the bill.

Find the traffic where gross margin inverts

Push the model to 10x and watch the point where each new user starts costing more than they bring in.

Test how hard your cache hit rate is working

Run the sensitivity. A few points of cache hit rate can decide whether a feature is viable at all.

Leave with a wired unit economics spreadsheet

Built live from provider pricing pages and your own cache-hit metrics, sensitivities already wired in.

Why this topic matters

Most AI features are priced on a demo. Then traffic multiplies, and the per-request cost that looked like a rounding error becomes the reason the feature gets cut. Knowing that number before finance does is a staff habit. We build the model live from provider pricing pages and real cache-hit metrics, push it to 10x, and find where gross margin inverts. You leave with the spreadsheet.

You'll learn from

Ehsan Gazar

Staff Software Engineer at Tipalti

I'm a Staff Software Engineer with 16 years building and scaling production systems across fintech, SaaS, and enterprise software. I've made hundreds of architectural decisions in systems that had to survive real traffic, incidents, and org politics.

I've run 500+ mentorship sessions with senior engineers at a 5.0 rating, helping them close the gap between writing code and thinking at the architectural level. I've also taught 10,000+ students and distilled what separates engineers who get promoted from those who stay stuck.

I'm not an academic. Every framework here comes from real decisions or mistakes I had to recover from. I’ll teach you to think like a Staff Software Engineer: not “what’s the right answer,” but “what are the trade-offs, and what survives contact with reality.”

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