Discount profitability calculator
Test several discounts against your price and unit cost. See the contribution left per unit and the sales volume increase each discount needs to keep the same gross profit.
Price and cost up to 1,000,000,000,000 with up to the selected currency decimal places (0 to 6). 1 to 20 different discounts from 0.01 to 99.99 percent with at most two decimal places. Calculated on your device. Download a JSON report and CSV files. Enter the list price, unit cost and the discounts to compare in the fields. Up to 1,000,000 characters. Review the settings before running.
Your result
How to use Discount profitability calculator
- Enter the list price and the variable cost per unit.
- List the discounts to test, separated by semicolons or spaces.
- Choose the currency and rounding, then calculate.
- Compare the required volume increase for each discount and download the table.
Useful next steps
Volume needed to stand still
With a 50.00 price and a 30.00 unit cost, each sale contributes 20.00. A 20 percent discount leaves 10.00, so you need to sell twice as many units, a 100 percent increase, to earn the same contribution. The required increase is the price reduction divided by the contribution left per unit, the breakeven sales change described in Nagle and Müller, The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing, 6th edition (Routledge, 2018).
When a discount cannot pay
If a discount is as large as the contribution margin, nothing is left per unit and no volume increase can recover the profit, so those rows show no result. The calculation treats unit cost as fully variable and ignores fixed costs, cannibalization and competitor reactions. Discounted prices are rounded to the currency decimal places before contribution is calculated.