> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.orbit.devotel.io/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Billing Calculator: the presale cost-estimation walkthrough

> Walk the Billing Calculator end-to-end for a presale estimate — RTC video minutes at a bundled per-tier rate, AI-agent usage per axis, and a reseller payout preview — then compare the lanes, share the estimate with finance, and back-test it against recorded usage once traffic is live.

# Billing Calculator: presale cost estimation

Open **Billing → Pricing Calculator** (`/billing/calculator`) when a prospect — or your own finance team — needs a number *before* a single message, video minute, or partner invoice exists. Every widget on the page is a read-only preview: nothing is charged, no wallet is debited, no payout is issued. You model a workload, read the projected cost, and hand it off.

This guide is the presale walkthrough: pick the right lane, run one worked example per lane, compare the estimates side by side, export them for finance sign-off, and back-test the numbers once traffic is live. For the widget-by-widget field reference and the API parity behind each one, see [Pricing calculator](/billing/pricing-calculator).

## 1. Three lanes of the calculator

The calculator page composes five widgets, but presale conversations split into three lanes. Know which lane your buyer is in before you start entering numbers:

| Lane                        | Widget                              | The presale question it answers                                                               |
| --------------------------- | ----------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **RTC / video minutes**     | RTC cost simulator                  | "We run video rooms of this shape — what does the month cost?"                                |
| **AI tokens / agent usage** | AI & marketplace pricing estimates  | "We expect this many AI messages, voice minutes, and resolutions — what does the month cost?" |
| **Reseller payout preview** | Partner / reseller payout statement | "We're white-labelling or referring — what is the partner owed for a period?"                 |

Two supporting widgets round the page out. The **channel cost estimate** (top of page) prices monthly messaging against your live per-country operator rate card — SMS resolves to a real number; voice, email, RCS, Viber, and WhatsApp honestly show "Rate unavailable — contact sales" rather than a fabricated one. The **volume savings** widget prices a hypothetical monthly volume through your volume-tier ladder and returns the effective per-unit rate — run it wherever your presale volume sits near a tier boundary, because the tiered rate can come out meaningfully below the list-rate estimate.

Every lane prices from the same rules the wallet bills under, so an estimate you run presale is reconcilable against the ledger once the workload goes live.

## 2. Presale estimate walkthrough

Walk each relevant lane the same way — pick the lane, enter the monthly volume, read the per-unit breakdown:

1. **Pick the lane.** Jump to the widget that matches the prospect's workload type: RTC simulator for video rooms, AI estimates for agent-driven workloads, the reseller preview for partner programs.
2. **Enter the monthly volume.** For RTC that's participants × minutes per room × rooms per month. For AI it's message count, voice minutes, and expected resolved outcomes. For reseller it's per-sub-account revenue and carrier cost plus the partner's revenue-share percentage. Use the prospect's own forecast — the estimate is only as honest as the volume you type in.
3. **Read the per-unit breakdown.** Every lane returns more than a headline total: the RTC lane reports participant-minutes and a **blended per-participant-minute rate** (the one number to compare provider-to-provider); the AI lane splits the estimate into per-axis line items; the reseller lane itemizes by sub-account. Quote the per-unit number in the presale conversation and the total in the budget conversation.

## 3. Worked example per lane

Run these three on the page today; the numbers below are what each lane's default inputs model.

### Lane A — RTC video minutes

A support desk plans 100 rooms per month, 30 minutes each, averaging 5 participants in HD:

1. Open the **RTC cost simulator** and set **Resolution tier** to **HD (up to 720p)** — the tier rates come from a static rate card (audio-only, SD, HD, Full HD), one bundled rate per tier with recording, captions, signaling, and one RTMP destination already included.
2. Enter **5 participants**, **30 minutes per room**, **100 rooms per month**, and run the forecast.
3. Read the breakdown: 5 × 30 × 100 = **15,000 participant-minutes per month**. At the HD bundled rate of $0.0055 per participant-minute, the projected monthly bill is **$82.50\*\* with no surprise line items — extras only appear if you add extra RTMP destinations, recording storage, or a dedicated SFU cluster.

### Lane B — AI tokens / agent usage

A prospects expects 10,000 AI messages, 500 voice minutes, and 200 resolved outcomes per month:

1. Open **AIaaS usage** under **AI & marketplace pricing estimates**, type the three counters, and estimate. The lane prices per message, per voice minute, and per resolved outcome — no platform or seat fee — and returns each axis as its own line item so finance can see which of the three drives the total.
2. If the workload is outcome-priced, open **Pay-per-resolution metering** instead: type **1,000 resolutions** at **$0.005 per resolution** and the returned estimate is **$5.00** — a simple count × rate projection. Toggling billing off returns the same metered count with a "no charge" badge, so you can model what a resolution pipeline costs once metering goes live on the account.
3. If the prospect publishes an agent or tool listing rather than consuming one, open **Marketplace rev-share**: **5,000 invocations** at **$0.02 per call** prices a **$100.00** gross charge; at a **20% platform fee** the platform fee is $20.00 and the **builder's net payout is $80.00\*\*. The preview also says whether that payout is above or below the payout threshold — below threshold rolls over instead of paying out.

### Lane C — Reseller payout preview

A white-label partner program runs three sub-accounts for one period, with a negotiated 20% revenue share:

| Sub-account | Revenue | Carrier cost | Net margin    | Partner share (20%) |
| ----------- | ------- | ------------ | ------------- | ------------------- |
| A           | \$4,000 | \$2,600      | \$1,400       | \$280.00            |
| B           | \$1,500 | \$1,100      | \$400         | \$80.00             |
| C           | \$800   | \$900        | −\$100 (loss) | \$0.00              |

1. Enter each sub-account's **revenue** and **carrier cost**, set the **channel**, the **partner id**, the **revenue-share percentage** (20%), and the **statement period**, then estimate.
2. Read the headline rows: gross revenue **$6,300**, cost of goods **$4,600**, net margin \*\*$1,700**. The aggregate partner share comes out of that aggregate net margin: 20% × $1,700 = **$340.00**, leaving **$1,360** platform-retained.
3. Read the per-sub-account line table. Sub-account C runs a loss for the period, and the split is applied per line with a zero floor — a loss line contributes a zero partner share rather than dragging the payout negative. The statement shapes what is *owed*; it computes no transfer and pays nothing out.

## 4. Compare lanes side by side

Presale proposals often span more than one lane — run each lane with the same month's assumptions and lay the results next to each other before committing any of them to a proposal:

* **Per-unit first.** Compare the RTC blended per-participant-minute rate against other providers, the AI per-axis rates against model-list pricing, and the reseller partner share as a percent of net margin. Per-unit numbers travel across workloads; totals don't.
* **Then totals.** Roll the lanes into one projected monthly number: for the examples above that's $82.50 (RTC) plus the AI axis totals, with the partner payout ($340.00 in the example) shaped separately as a cost of the program, not a usage charge.
* **Screenshot or share.** The messaging lane's **Share estimate** button encodes the current configuration into a URL a teammate can open to see the same inputs; the other lanes are screenshot-ready result panels. Attach either to the proposal so the numbers survive the hand-off.

## 5. Export the estimate for finance sign-off

Finance needs a defensible number, not a dashboard screenshot. Two rules keep the estimate sign-off-ready:

1. **Use the per-unit breakdown, not the total.** The RTC blended rate and the per-axis AI totals are the numbers that survive a volume adjustment — if the prospect later halves their volume, finance can recompute from the breakdown without re-opening the dashboard.
2. **Run the volume tier before you quote the total.** If the messaging lane's list-rate estimate is part of the proposal, run that same volume through the **volume savings** widget first. Above 500K messages per month the messaging lane deliberately swaps the estimate for a volume-discount contact card, because list rates stop being a meaningful anchor at that scale — if your prospect is anywhere near a tier boundary, quote from the tier-adjusted effective rate in [Volume tiers and revenue recognition](/guides/billing-revenue-and-volume-tiers), not the back-of-envelope multiply.

Because every lane prices on the same rules billing uses, the export is a projection, not a promise: the final invoice follows actual delivery and any negotiated overrides on the account.

## 6. Back-test once traffic is live

The calculator models traffic you haven't sent yet. Once the workload has run for a few weeks, close the loop with the **What-if pricing simulator** (`/billing/simulator`): it replays your *recorded* usage from the last 1–90 days through a candidate rate card, so you can back-test whether the presale rate is still the right one now that real traffic exists. The full walkthrough is in [What-if pricing simulator](/guides/whatif-pricing-simulator) — and the month-end close that follows (statements, volume tiers, recognition) is in [Volume tiers and revenue recognition](/guides/billing-revenue-and-volume-tiers).

## Related

* [Pricing calculator](/billing/pricing-calculator) — field-by-field reference for all five widgets and the API endpoints behind them.
* [What-if pricing simulator](/guides/whatif-pricing-simulator) — back-test a candidate rate card against your recorded usage.
* [Volume tiers and revenue recognition](/guides/billing-revenue-and-volume-tiers) — tiered pricing, statements, and the month-end close.
* [Rate cards](/billing/rate-cards) — the rate-card library and per-card pricing cells.