Financial & Unit Economics

Cost of Goods Sold COGS

CFO CEO VP Engineering COO

Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) represents the direct costs attributable to delivering a product or service to customers, sitting directly below revenue on the income statement to calculate gross profit. For SaaS businesses, COGS typically includes cloud hosting, third-party API costs, customer support, and professional services delivery. COGS directly determines gross margin.

For SaaS companies, COGS is often the most controllable path to margin improvement because engineering-driven infrastructure optimization can reduce hosting costs without affecting the product customer experience.

Formula

Total Direct Costs Attributable to Revenue Delivery

Where It Lives

AWS / GCP / AzureInfrastructure cost dashboards for cloud COGS
NetSuiteCOGS accounting and gross profit P&L reporting
Zendesk / IntercomSupport cost tracking as a COGS component
Apptio / CloudHealthFinOps tooling for cloud cost allocation to COGS

What Drives It

Cloud infrastructure spend relative to user or transaction volume
Customer support ticket volume and resolution cost
Third-party API and data service costs embedded in the product
Professional services delivery cost for implementation projects
Infrastructure efficiency improvements from engineering optimization

Causal Analysis: Cloud cost optimization initiatives can be directly and causally linked to COGS reduction by measuring infrastructure cost before and after specific engineering changes in controlled environments.

Benchmark

SaaS COGS as a percentage of revenue should be below 25% for software-only businesses; businesses with significant services components may run 35%–45% COGS.

Common Mistake

Allocating too many overhead costs (office space, HR, finance) to COGS instead of G&A, which inflates reported COGS and understates true gross margin.

How different roles think about this metric

Each function reads COGS through a different lens and takes different actions when it changes.

CFO

The CFO tracks COGS line items granularly and sets budgets for each component, using variance analysis to identify where costs are drifting above plan.

CEO

The CEO monitors COGS as a percentage of revenue over time to confirm gross margin expansion as the business scales.

VP Engineering

The VP Engineering owns the infrastructure component of COGS and drives FinOps practices to reduce cloud spend as a percentage of revenue.

COO

The COO manages support and professional services COGS components, optimizing team productivity to maintain or improve gross margins.

Common Questions About Cost of Goods Sold

Click any question to expand the answer.

What is the difference between COGS and operating expenses?

COGS are direct costs required to deliver the product or service (hosting, support, services delivery). Operating expenses (OpEx) are costs to run the business that are not directly tied to production: sales and marketing, R&D, and G&A. COGS is subtracted from revenue to get gross profit; operating expenses are subtracted from gross profit to get operating income.

How do I reduce COGS in a SaaS business?

The most impactful levers are: cloud infrastructure optimization (right-sizing, reserved instances, architecture improvements), customer support deflection through self-service help centers and in-app guidance that reduce ticket volume, and professional services standardization through productized implementation that reduces per-project labor. Each dollar of COGS reduction flows directly to gross profit with no offset.

Should stock-based compensation be included in COGS?

GAAP accounting requires SBC to be included in the functional expense line where the employee works, including COGS for engineers working on product delivery. However, many SaaS companies report non-GAAP gross margin that excludes SBC from COGS. When comparing gross margins across companies, confirm whether both are including or excluding SBC.

How does COGS scale with revenue in SaaS?

In a well-run SaaS business, COGS should scale sub-linearly with revenue. That is, COGS grows more slowly than revenue as the company scales, improving gross margin over time. This happens because infrastructure costs have significant fixed and semi-fixed components, support efficiency improves as the product matures, and professional services become more productized. Gross margin expansion over time is evidence that COGS is scaling efficiently.

Related Metrics

Metrics that are commonly analyzed alongside COGS.

GM% | Gross Margin Operating Margin | Operating Margin Infrastructure Cost Per User | Infrastructure Cost Per User RPE | Revenue Per Employee

Role guides that include this metric

See how each role uses COGS in context with the full set of metrics they own.

CFO Guide → CEO Guide → VP Engineering Guide → COO Guide →

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