The arithmetic
You bill a hundred dollars an hour. That is not what the hour costs.
A recharge rate is a price, not a cost. Behind every hour on the column sits a nine-figure instrument, a service contract, and a finite number of productive hours in the year to spread them across. Put your own numbers in below and see what one hour is really worth — then see what the wasted ones add up to.
What you bill
$100
Per instrument-hour, recharged.
What it costs
$2,100
Depreciation plus service, spread over your productive hours.
The gap
21×
How far the real number sits above the billed one.
Fig. 01 Updates live from the inputs below. This is why a lost night is not a hundred-dollar problem — and why recovering a handful of hours a week is not a rounding error.
The calculator
Your numbers, your estimates, plain arithmetic.
Nothing here is a benchmark we are asserting. The cost side is your facility’s finances; the recovery side is your judgement about how much of each loss a connected workflow removes. Every default is conservative and every field is editable.
Column hours recovered
306
Across every instrument, per year.
Value at true cost
$642,600
Recovered hours × real cost per hour.
Staff cost avoided
$23,400
Hours no longer spent on glue and re-entry.
Total annual value
$666,000
At your billed rate it would read $30,600.
Enter a figure to see net value and payback period.
Fig. 02 Every figure above is derived from the fields you just filled in. Change a recovery slider to zero and the number it feeds goes to zero — there is no floor built in.
Capacity economics
Faster processing changes how much infrastructure you need.
A throughput improvement can be used two ways: finish the same workload sooner, or process more work with the microscopes you already own. The figures below are kept separate from annual recovered value to avoid counting the same benefit twice.
Additional capacity
1,500 hrs
More work per instrument, per year.
Same workload
3,846 hrs
Finished 1,154 hours sooner.
Capacity equivalent
0.30 scope
Equivalent fraction of another instrument.
Potential cost deferral
$30,000,000
Plus $150,000/year in service capacity.
The capital and service figures are capacity equivalents, not automatic cash savings. They become avoided or deferred cost only when the added throughput delays an instrument purchase, service contract, expansion, or outsourced processing commitment.
Where the hours come from
A number is only worth as much as its mechanism.
Each driver in the calculator corresponds to something specific in the product. If you do not believe the mechanism, set that slider to zero — the model will agree with you.
Hours you stop spending on setup
Pixel size, matrix calibration, beam shift, dose, apertures, detector references and preset alignment can be shown in a software preflight for operator review. The preflight does not replace instrument checks or a trained operator’s safety decision.
See the mechanism 02Hours you stop re-collecting
Drift rate, CTF fit confidence, motion and ice reach the queue while the session is still running, and the queue is allowed to act on them — continue, recheck, skip, pause. A problem caught in minute ten does not cost you the night.
See the mechanism 03Hours the column stops sitting idle
Bookings, samples, projects and instruments share one model, so a gap is visible before it happens and the grid queued behind it is already logged, shipped and accounted for.
See the mechanism 04Staff time that stops going into glue
Metadata that never has to be re-entered at a boundary, reports that are a view rather than a spreadsheet, and methods added as plugins rather than as scripts somebody has to keep alive.
See the mechanismMethodology
How this is calculated, in full.
True cost per instrument-hour = (capital value ÷ depreciation period + annual service contract) ÷ productive hours per year. It deliberately excludes staff salaries, facilities, consumables and grid preparation, so the figure it produces is a floor rather than a full cost recovery model.
Column hours recovered = the sum of each driver’s annual hours × your recovery percentage, multiplied by the number of instruments. The three drivers are assumed not to overlap; if they do overlap in your facility, lower the percentages accordingly.
Staff cost avoided = weekly staff hours × recovery share × 52 × loaded hourly cost. It is counted once for the facility, not per instrument.
Throughput capacity uses the entered improvement as a rate multiplier. A 30% improvement produces 30% more annual capacity; the same fixed workload takes 1 ÷ 1.30 of the original time, which is 23.1% less elapsed time. Capacity-equivalent capital and service are proportional planning values and are not added to annual savings unless they actually defer a purchase or contract.
What this is not. These are not measured results, a benchmark, or a promise. The recovery percentages are your estimate of how much of each loss a connected workflow removes, and the defaults are set low on purpose. The honest use of this page is to establish the order of magnitude of an hour — and then to check the mechanisms above against your own experience.
Get started
Bring your own numbers to the conversation.
Run the demo session, read how the hours are recovered, and then decide what the arithmetic is worth.