Write a Javascript Cost Calculator for Stripe's Graduated Pricing

Calculating the total cost of a graduated pricing scheme is a PITA if you have to do it more than once - and Stripe’s Price dashboard unfortunately doesn’t have any tooling to help you. Instead of doing it by hand every time, let’s write a Javascript calculator to do it for us.

Why 🔗︎

Plenty of reasons you’d want to test out potential pricing scenarios before they actually happen - getting quotes for prospective customers, comparison with competitors, checking the impact of discount codes, etc. There’s a reason sites exist like Serverless Cost Calculator for AWS .

Wait, what is graduated pricing 🔗︎

Stripe offers a graduated pricing model under Usage-based Billing , e.g.:

Graduated Pricing Calculator 🔗︎

disclaimer: for now you can only use the hardcoded tiers on this page - but feel free to remix it for your own usecase! Copy the code below and edit pricingTiers to update the calculator. The function can be copied directly into your browser console or into anywhere that runs Javascript.

The Code 🔗︎

    <div>
    <br />
    <div class="row">
        <div class="col-sm-6">
            <strong>Total Users: </strong>
            <input type="number" id="numUsersInput" min="0" value="50" onChange="calculateCostFromUsers(this.value)" style="max-width: 80px" />
        </div>
        <div class="col-sm-6">
            <strong>
            Total Cost:
            <span id="displayCost">
            $0
            </span></strong>
        </div>
    </div>
    <h4 class="text-center">Marginal Cost Breakdown</h4>
    <div class="container" id="displayBreakdown">
    </div>
</div>
<script>
let displayElem = document.getElementById("displayCost");
let displayBreakdownElem = document.getElementById("displayBreakdown");

const calculateCostFromUsers = (totalNumUsers) => {
    let marginalBreakdownStrs = [];

    const pricingTiers = [
        { tier: 0, marginalUserSlots: 2, costPerUser: 0.0 },
        { tier: 1, marginalUserSlots: 5, costPerUser: 2.0 },
        { tier: 2, marginalUserSlots: 15, costPerUser: 1.5 },
        { tier: 3, marginalUserSlots: 50, costPerUser: 1.25 },
        { tier: 4, marginalUserSlots: 999999999, costPerUser: 1.0 },
    ]

    let finalCost = 0.0;
    let remainingUsers = totalNumUsers;

    for (let i = 0; i < pricingTiers.length; i++) {
        let tier = pricingTiers[i];
        if (tier.marginalUserSlots < remainingUsers) {
            // calculate cost
            finalCost += tier.marginalUserSlots * tier.costPerUser;
            marginalBreakdownStrs.push(`${tier.marginalUserSlots} @ $${tier.costPerUser}`)
            // remove the users
            remainingUsers -= tier.marginalUserSlots;
        } else {
            // only need the partial group of the marginal user slots/ potentially all of them
            finalCost += (tier.costPerUser * remainingUsers)
            marginalBreakdownStrs.push(`${remainingUsers} @ $${tier.costPerUser}`)
            remainingUsers = 0;
        }
        console.log('RemainingUsers: ', remainingUsers)
    }

    displayElem.innerHTML = `$${finalCost}`;

    let breakdownHtml = '';
    marginalBreakdownStrs.forEach(s => {
    breakdownHtml += `<p class="text-center"><em>${s}</em></p>`
    })
    displayBreakdownElem.innerHTML = breakdownHtml;
    // display breakdown strings neatly
    console.log(marginalBreakdownStrs)
    return finalCost;
}
let totalNumUsers = document.getElementById("numUsersInput").value;
calculateCostFromUsers(totalNumUsers)
</script>