Price Increase Break-Even Calculator · guide
Short answer: more than you think when your margin is thin, and less when it is fat. A raise earns extra on every unit you keep and loses the whole unit margin on every unit you lose, so the break-even is set by your margin, not by how nervous the raise feels.
break-even volume loss = (new price - old price) / (new price - unit cost) price 100, cost 60, raise 10% -> 10 / 50 = 20% of units price 100, cost 90, raise 10% -> 10 / 20 = 50% of units price 100, cost 95, raise 2% -> 2 / 7 = 29% of units
Read it as: the raise is paid for by the units you keep. When the raise is large next to the margin you already earn, each kept unit pays for many lost ones. When the margin is already fat, the same raise barely changes what a unit earns, so losing units hurts quickly. Fixed overhead stays out of it: it does not move when a customer walks away.
Past sales show your margin exactly and say nothing about how customers will react. The calculator therefore reports, for every item, the elasticity at which the raise stops paying. If you believe your customers are less sensitive than that, raise; if not, leave it.
Divide the dollar raise by the new unit margin: with a unit margin of 40 on a price of 100, a 10% raise lets you lose 10 / 50 = 20% of units before profit falls; at a unit margin of 10 the same raise tolerates 10 / 20 = 50%. Thin-margin items can lose more units.
Nobody knows without testing. Treat 1.0 as a neutral placeholder and read the tool's break-even elasticity for each item: if your customers are less sensitive than that number, the raise pays.
node cli.mjs analyze items.csv --increase 8.