Problem
Narev is self-hosted, but today its cost story is mostly focused on imported cloud/provider billing data. For self-hosters, the real monthly cost also includes owned hardware: servers, storage, networking equipment, and other capital expenses that should be depreciated over time.
Without hardware depreciation, users cannot easily compare cloud spend against the true monthly cost of running infrastructure themselves.
Proposed solution
Add a Self-hosted TCO / Hardware Depreciation feature.
Users should be able to define hardware assets with fields such as:
- Purchase price
- Currency
- Purchase date
- Useful life in months
- Optional salvage value
- Optional label/category, such as server, storage, networking, GPU, etc.
Narev would calculate monthly depreciation using:
monthly depreciation = (purchase price - salvage value) / useful life in months
This should appear in the product as part of a Self-hosted monthly cost or Unit Economics view. The dashboard could show:
- Monthly cloud/provider effective cost
- Monthly hardware depreciation
- Combined all-in monthly cost
- Trend over time
A natural first UI home is the existing Unit Economics dashboard area, since this is already intended for cost-rate and unit-economics analysis. Longer term, hardware asset assumptions could be managed from Settings.
Alternatives considered
One alternative is to insert hardware depreciation as synthetic FOCUS billing rows in the existing billing data table, for example as Adjustment or Purchase charges. This would make existing billing rollups include depreciation automatically, but it risks mixing imported provider billing data with user-defined internal accounting assumptions.
Another option is to keep this as documentation only: explain how self-hosters can calculate monthly hardware depreciation manually. That would improve positioning quickly, but would not make Narev more useful as an actual planning tool.
A third option is to expose depreciation as environment/config values only. This is simple, but too limited for users with multiple assets, different purchase dates, and different depreciation timelines.
Additional context
Example:
Server purchase price: $3,600
Useful life: 36 months
Salvage value: $0
Monthly depreciation: $100/month
If a user has $500/month in cloud/provider costs and $100/month in hardware depreciation, Narev could show an all-in monthly cost of $600/month.
Problem
Narev is self-hosted, but today its cost story is mostly focused on imported cloud/provider billing data. For self-hosters, the real monthly cost also includes owned hardware: servers, storage, networking equipment, and other capital expenses that should be depreciated over time.
Without hardware depreciation, users cannot easily compare cloud spend against the true monthly cost of running infrastructure themselves.
Proposed solution
Add a Self-hosted TCO / Hardware Depreciation feature.
Users should be able to define hardware assets with fields such as:
Narev would calculate monthly depreciation using:
This should appear in the product as part of a Self-hosted monthly cost or Unit Economics view. The dashboard could show:
A natural first UI home is the existing Unit Economics dashboard area, since this is already intended for cost-rate and unit-economics analysis. Longer term, hardware asset assumptions could be managed from Settings.
Alternatives considered
One alternative is to insert hardware depreciation as synthetic FOCUS billing rows in the existing billing data table, for example as
AdjustmentorPurchasecharges. This would make existing billing rollups include depreciation automatically, but it risks mixing imported provider billing data with user-defined internal accounting assumptions.Another option is to keep this as documentation only: explain how self-hosters can calculate monthly hardware depreciation manually. That would improve positioning quickly, but would not make Narev more useful as an actual planning tool.
A third option is to expose depreciation as environment/config values only. This is simple, but too limited for users with multiple assets, different purchase dates, and different depreciation timelines.
Additional context
Example:
If a user has $500/month in cloud/provider costs and $100/month in hardware depreciation, Narev could show an all-in monthly cost of
$600/month.