SOFTWARE ECONOMICS
Same engineering. Same defensibility.
Without the marketing tax baked in.
Same quality, precision, and audit-defensibility as the firms charging $2,000–$4,000. We deliver the engineering — not the marketing videos. The ledger below shows where the cost stack breaks differently for a software-economics study, and where it doesn’t break at all.
The ledger
Where a traditional cost-seg invoice spends its money.
| Layer | Traditional study | CostSegLogic |
|---|---|---|
Inside sales & quote-and-followup Traditional firms quote per-property, follow up via email, qualify you on a discovery call. The whole pipeline is staffed and overhead-loaded, and you pay for it whether you close or not. We have no inside sales. You start the interview, you see your number. | ~$600 | $0 |
Engineering site visit An engineer flies, drives, or walks your property to photograph and measure. The IRS does not require an in-person visit for an STR. A documented methodology with the right inputs holds up the same — and we collect the right inputs in the interview. | ~$1,500 | $0 |
Manual asset classification Most of the dollars in a $5,000 study go here: an analyst types your purchase price, settlement statement, and asset list into a spreadsheet, then maps each line to a 5-, 15-, 27.5-, or 39-year class. The work is rule-based and repetitive. Software does it in seconds, with the same rule book. | ~$1,500 | ~$50 |
Per-study margin What's left after the labor lines are paid is margin. We keep ours modest because the work is software-driven and we'd rather sell ten thousand studies than fifty. Same engineering, fairer pricing. | ~$1,400 | ~$445 |
| Total | ~$5,000 | $495 |
Figures in the ledger are illustrative ranges based on public industry quotes ($3K–$8K traditional studies) and our own unit economics. Specific firms vary. The point is the shape of the cost stack, not a line-item audit.
What we don’t cut
The labor we’ve removed is the rote stuff — the data entry, the formatting, the inside-sales pipeline. None of that is where the defensibility of a study lives. The defensibility lives in the methodology, the citations, and the documentation. We didn’t cut any of those. Every CostSegLogic study uses the same IRS-aligned asset-classification rule book the big firms use, applies the same MACRS depreciation conventions, cites the same code sections, and ships with the same Form 3115 a traditional study includes.
We also don’t cut the CPA pass. On the $1,199 CPA-Verified tier a licensed CPA reviews the study and signs off, with an audit-defense letter on file. On the $495 tier we welcome you to put the study in front of your own CPA. That’s not bravado — it’s the byproduct of doing the work properly the first time.
And we’ve added one thing a traditional study almost never gives you: a plain-English recapture schedule and a state-specific treatment of bonus depreciation and conformity rules. The federal number alone doesn’t tell the whole story, so we don’t ship the federal number alone.
STILL CURIOUS?
Run the free snapshot — you’ll see exactly what we ship.
The free snapshot is the same engine the paid report uses, scoped to the cover-page deduction estimate. If the number is big enough to upgrade, you upgrade. If not, you don’t pay anything.