What is the real monthly cost of a data product?
Most data budgets only capture infrastructure cost. The real monthly cost of a data product, once you add incidents, support, and change requests, is typically 2-4× that. PCU-V (Portfolio Capacity Units, Verified) measures the true carrying cost and gives your portfolio a capacity ceiling you can defend.
PCU-V, Portfolio Capacity Units, Verified, is the true monthly cost of sustaining a single data product. It's the denominator of the Portfolio ROI Ratio and the metric most data budgets get wrong.
The four components
- Infrastructure, cloud, storage, compute, licensing. The line item every CFO already sees.
- Incident response, engineering time spent fixing the product when it breaks, priced at fully-loaded hourly cost.
- Support load, analyst and engineering time spent answering questions, validating numbers, training users.
- Change requests, recurring small modifications that aren't roadmap work but consume capacity every month.
Why infrastructure-only is misleading
Most data product cost reporting stops at infrastructure. PCU-V routinely surfaces a carrying cost 2 to 4× higher once human time is included. A dashboard with €400/month of cloud cost can easily carry €2,800/month in incident, support, and change-request load.
That distinction is the difference between a product that looks profitable and a product that's quietly burning capacity every month.
How to calculate it
- Pull the infrastructure cost from your cloud bill, tagged to the product.
- Estimate hours per month spent on incidents for this product (last 90 days, averaged).
- Estimate hours per month spent on support and ad-hoc requests tied to it.
- Estimate hours per month spent on small change requests.
- Multiply each hour figure by the fully-loaded hourly cost of the people doing the work.
- Sum. That's PCU-V.
The Portfolio ROI Ratio
Once PCU-V is known per product, you can calculate:
Portfolio ROI Ratio = FTE Debt displaced ÷ PCU-V
A product displacing €15,000/month of FTE Debt while carrying €3,000/month in PCU-V has a ratio of 5.0. Strong asset. Keep investing. A product displacing €1,200/month while carrying €4,000/month has a ratio of 0.3. Sunset candidate.
Related reading
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