Cost per user: a practical angle on the build vs buy dilemma
Calculating the true cost of adding content editing to your app? It's harder than it sounds. There are multiple angles to consider – engineering hours, opportunity cost, infrastructure, maintenance, team bandwidth, feature parity, time to market. You can easily spend weeks modeling it and still feel unsure. That’s why we always recommend breaking it down into smaller views. One of the most practical ones? Cost per active user.
Why cost per user matters
For some apps, content editing is a core feature. Think design platforms, branding tools, or white-labeled content creation products. For others, it’s a value-add – something that helps retain users or drive up engagement without being central.
If you fall in the second camp, cost per user can be a very helpful way to decide whether to build or buy. It grounds the decision in unit economics rather than abstract debates about flexibility or control.
So I've built a quick calculator to help with that…
A simple calculator to help you model your scenario
With the help of Lovable AI (shout out), we created a basic cost-per-user calculator using Polotno SDK pricing.
It lets you plug in:
Monthly vs annual billing (annual saves 15%)
Estimated number of users who actively use the editor
Plan size (team vs business)
Cloud rendering volume: image and video rendering numbers
Say you have 10,000 users. Maybe 2,000 of them actually use the editor. You're on a team plan. If your users render ~20,000 images and 10,000 minutes of video per month, your cost comes out to **$0.25 per user/month.** That’s with full image/video editing capabilities baked into your product.
The calculator lets you explore different growth scenarios—like what happens when you upgrade to a business plan or scale to 50,000 users.
It won’t tell you everything
To be clear: this calculator is not a complete ROI tool. It's just one lens. For some businesses, price per user won’t matter because content editing is absolutely indispensable. But for many others, this simple view brings surprising clarity.
TL;DR
Cost-benefit analysis is hard—don’t trust back-of-napkin estimates.
Break it down into angles. Cost per user is a good one.
Use the calculator to explore real scenarios based on your scale and use case.
Still unsure? Hit us up—we’ll help you model your situation and find the right setup.