How many sales does your digital product need to break even?
Separate creation costs, ongoing expenses and per-sale costs to build a useful break-even plan.
Start with a time period, not a revenue goal
A $1,000 launch can look successful until you remember the designer, the software subscriptions and the ads that made it possible. Break-even planning asks a narrower question: how many initial orders cover the costs allocated to this month? It cannot tell you whether those orders will arrive.
Choose a recovery period for one-time creation costs. Recovering a $600 production budget over three months adds $200 to each monthly plan. This is a planning allocation, not an accounting depreciation schedule. Your cash still left your bank account when you paid the bill.
Find the contribution from an order
Start with the price after any discount. Subtract the expected refunded revenue, transaction fees, delivery or support cost and customer acquisition cost. The remainder is contribution: the amount available to cover fixed costs and, eventually, profit.
Our default model charges acquisition and delivery costs on every initial order, including orders later refunded. This avoids assuming that a refund reverses work already done. Fee retention on refunds is a separate, editable assumption.
A worked example with explicit assumptions
Imagine a $30 guide with $2 in fees and $4 of delivery and acquisition cost per initial order. With no refunds, contribution is $24. A $120 monthly overhead budget plus $240 of allocated launch cost produces $360 of monthly fixed costs. The plan breaks even at 15 orders: $360 ÷ $24.
At 14 orders, profit is negative $24. At 16 orders, profit is positive $24. These illustrative fees are deliberately generic. Use the sourced platform presets to model a specific provider.
A negative contribution is a pricing problem
If each extra order loses money, selling more will not pay back fixed costs. First test a higher price, lower variable costs or a less expensive acquisition channel. When fees change at a volume threshold, evaluate that threshold explicitly; dividing by today’s average contribution can miss the change.
The planner searches whole order counts and includes the Gumroad volume tier. A result above the tool’s one-million-order search limit is shown as unavailable, not as zero. No break-even result is a forecast of demand.
Make the plan survive an ordinary bad month
Save a base scenario, then test fewer orders and a higher refund rate. Check whether the product remains cash-positive before launch-cost allocation. If the base case works only with a perfect conversion rate, the next task is to test the offer or reduce the committed budget.
Remember your time. Add contracted help to costs, and use your target monthly profit to reflect the compensation you need for your own work. Revenue is not your salary.