Every element of our ASIC TCO Calculator is shaped by hands-on mining experience, so every field, slider, and insight mirrors the realities of running a fleet.

1. Input Expected Revenue — projected BTC (or hosting) earnings for the analysis window.

2. Populate the Acquisition tab — enter your ASIC hardware price, taxes & duties, freight, racking/facility costs, plus installation labour.

3. Add Operating costs — power rate, routine maintenance, repair parts, monitoring software, third-party service contracts, downtime losses, licensing, end-of-life recycling, and staffing.

4. State Opportunity costs — capital lock-up, residual-value drag, lost revenue during outages, deferred-tax impacts, foregone gains from newer rigs, and missed flexible-energy payments.

5. Review the Summary — the dashboard instantly rolls everything into Total Acquisition Cost, Total Operating Cost, Total Opportunity Cost, headline TCO.

6. Iterate — nudge power price or uptime, and watch the break-even line move before you commit capital.

Our model treats an ASIC like any other capital asset:

TCO $=$ Acquisition $+$ Operating $+$ Opportunity $-$ Residual Value

Capturing every dollar —up-front, recurring, and implicit— shows the true cost per terahash and flags the exact moment a rig should be upgraded, redeployed, or sold.

Rather than “mining pools,” think cost pools:

• Load-shift pools — place the highest-efficiency rigs on your cheapest-power sites first.
• Maintenance pools — centralize spare parts and techs to shorten repair times.
• Contract pools — blend fixed, indexed, and DR-enabled PPAs to damp power-price shocks.

Act on the numbers the calculator reveals. It translates insights into practical levers you can pull across multiple sites. TCO isn’t just a diagnostic; it feeds a site-level playbook that can immediately improve margins.

Yes. Mining stays profitable when total TCO stays under ~70 % of projected revenue. The calculator proves that miners who lock in low power rates, keep uptime high, and retire rigs before resale value crashes can ride out hash-price slumps. Use it to steer both your broad business model and daily lifecycle choices.

Instead of asking “How long to mine 1 BTC,” the model plots cumulative cash flow and forecasts profit over time. Adjust hash-price, power rate, uptime, or efficiency to compare best- and worst-case timelines before signing the PO.