# Video, credits, workload and economics

> **Connected dashboard practice:** [Connect direct vendor cost, customer workload, meters, MRR and period cash without mixing their units.](/dashboards/#stop-economics)

A source minute, a generated video, a dubbing minute, a generative credit, a render second and a useful customer task are different units. Public pricing supports separate meters; the lab's reservation and settlement rules are invented practice mechanics, not verified AI Studios billing.

**Direct vendor cost:** every render attempt, translation operation, delivery/storage proxy, vendor review fraction and support handling in sim_costs. Failed and free work still costs money. v_task preaggregates those lines before joining one task row. sim_attempts costs are not separately summed. Quantity × rate = line cost; all rates are illustrative USD assumptions, not actual cloud/provider prices.

**Period service cost:** direct lines plus idle capacity and shared service allocations. Q18 aggregates each input to month independently, then joins, avoiding cost/billing fan-out. The period attribution of task costs is the task-created month, a management convention; it is not a provider invoice or recognized accounting policy.

**Customer labor:** preparation, review and repair in sim_reviews. Customer minutes are separate from vendor staff costs. An invented manual baseline minus those minutes is an estimated net-work proxy, not demonstrated causal savings. A matched task comparison with quality parity is needed.

**Cash contribution:** cash received minus refunds, payment fees and declared service costs. R&D is shown separately. Acquisition and unmodeled corporate overhead/taxes/commitments are not included in the displayed after-R&D proxy, so neither figure is net profit or recognized gross margin. Do not add acquisition_usd again to direct task cost; it is a separate signup allocation.

**MRR:** opening + new + expansion − contraction − churn = closing. Contract values are invented and normalized monthly; they are not copied public prices. Calendar-month data simplifies real anniversary billing. GRR excludes expansion; NRR includes expansion but both exclude new sales. The lab has no reactivation or one-off packs. Zero opening MRR makes retention undefined, not zero. Four rounding residuals in the initial draft were assigned to their movement to retain exact closing/carry-forward; cash did not change.

**Entitlement ledger:** reserved = consumed + released + outstanding, within a meter. The final simulated tasks have zero outstanding balance. This proves arithmetic in the fictional ledger, not production debit correctness. The PRD still needs duplicate, failed-job, cancellation, expiry and ambiguous-write tests. Purchased entitlement cash is not automatically earned revenue.

**Sensitivity:** vary render duration, retries, active review effort, support, utilization, confirmation coverage and account concentration before proposing a price. These inputs can move cost in different directions. Do not infer demand or conversion from a price-and-allowance scenario alone. No synthetic result supplies an actual company target.