Why Savings Calculators Are Often Wrong
Most “savings calculators” for network products use overly optimistic assumptions to produce impressive-looking numbers. We built Apptifi’s calculator to be conservative and transparent — so the estimate you see is one you can actually defend to a CFO.
Here is exactly how it works.
The Core Assumption: 65% Off-Peak Savings Rate
The calculator applies a 65% savings rate to off-peak hours. This means for every dollar you currently spend during off-peak windows, we assume you will capture 65 cents of that back through scheduling.
Why 65% rather than 100%? Because:
- • You will not schedule your circuit to zero bandwidth off-peak. A minimum viable tier (typically 10–50 Mbps) is needed for overnight monitoring, alerts, and out-of-hours access.
- • Real-world IoD pricing has non-linear tier steps, so dropping from 1 Gbps to 200 Mbps saves less than 80% of the hourly rate — more like 65–70% depending on your provider’s pricing schedule.
- • Buffer windows around peak hours reduce the effective off-peak window by 30–60 minutes per day.
The 65% rate is derived from observed savings across live IoD deployments. It consistently falls within 5% of actual first-month savings for customers who implement a basic business hours schedule.
The Formula
Given: - Monthly bill: Your current total IoD spend per month - Peak hours/day: How many hours per day your circuit needs to run at full bandwidth
The calculation is:
1. Off-peak fraction: (24 − peak hours) ÷ 24 2. Potential off-peak spend: Monthly bill × off-peak fraction 3. Estimated monthly savings: Potential off-peak spend × 0.65 4. Net savings: Monthly savings − $50 (Apptifi monthly plan cost)
Example: A 1 Gbps Circuit Running 10 Peak Hours/Day
- • Monthly bill: $2,000
- • Peak hours: 10/day → off-peak fraction = 14/24 = 58.3%
- • Potential off-peak spend: $2,000 × 0.583 = $1,167
- • Estimated monthly savings: $1,167 × 0.65 = $758
- • Net of Apptifi cost: $758 − $50 = **$708/month net savings**
- • Annual net savings: **$8,500**
Validating Against Your Actual Bill
After your first month of scheduling, compare the “Bandwidth Tier Hours” breakdown on your IoD invoice (most providers include this) against the calculator estimate.
The two figures you want to check: 1. Hours billed at peak tier — should match your scheduled peak window, give or take buffer time 2. Hours billed at off-peak tier — should account for the remainder
If your actual savings are materially lower than the estimate, the most common causes are: insufficient schedule coverage (gaps where the circuit stayed at peak tier), overlapping manual orders that overrode scheduled events, or a minimum viable tier that is higher than assumed.
A Note on Multi-Circuit Deployments
The calculator models a single circuit. For organizations with multiple IoD circuits, multiply the single-circuit estimate by the number of circuits with similar utilization patterns. The savings scale linearly — Apptifi’s flat pricing does not increase per circuit, so additional circuits on the same plan have zero marginal software cost.