PerUnit VS ViewForge

PerUnit's answer

PerUnit is built for AI unit economics, not just cost tracking. We break down AI spend by:

Customer — see which accounts drive costs Feature — see which AI features burn through tokens Pricing tier — free vs paid user breakdown We connect AI costs to revenue via Stripe. Provider dashboards show totals; observability tools show tokens. PerUnit shows who's driving costs and whether they're profitable. No data warehouse or pipelines — direct API sync to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

ViewForge's answer:

Three things. (1) Data ownership: ViewForge writes fitment as Shopify metaobjects native to your store — most competitors store fitment in their own database. (2) 8 verticals out of the box: auto, motorcycle, tractor, marine, power equipment, bicycle, printer, electronics — most competitors are automotive-only. (3) Smart Parse: extract fitment automatically from your existing product titles and descriptions instead of re-typing everything.

PerUnit's answer

PerUnit is built for product and pricing decisions, not observability. Competitors focus on tokens, latency, and traces. We focus on:

Cost per customer Cost per feature Cost per tier — connected to revenue If you need to know who to charge more, what to gate, or where to cut, PerUnit gives you that. No pipelines, no data engineering, no data warehouse.

ViewForge's answer:

Data ownership. Fitment lives in your Shopify metaobjects, so uninstalling does not take your compatibility data with it. Convermax, EasySearch and PartFinder all keep it in their own databases, and getting it back depends on their export tooling on the day you cancel.

Cost at the low end. The search widget, the compatibility table on the product page and the saved-vehicle garage are all on the free tier, up to 50 products, with no expiry. EasySearch puts the table and the garage behind its $75/month Premium plan. Convermax starts at $250/month.

Automotive and non-automotive coverage. Eight built-in templates, and fully custom templates from $19/month, for catalogs that do not decompose into Year/Make/Model at all.

PerUnit's answer

Founders, product managers, and CFOs at companies building AI-powered products. Anyone who needs to answer:

Which customers cost the most? Are free users profitable? Should we gate AI behind paid plans? Teams that care about unit economics and margins, not just total spend.

ViewForge's answer:

Shopify merchants whose customers need to know whether a part fits before they will buy it — and who do not have an engineer on staff to build that themselves.

Concretely: auto and truck parts retailers, powersports and motorcycle dealers, tractor and agricultural parts sellers, marine and outboard suppliers, small-engine and power equipment stores, bicycle and e-bike component shops, printer supply merchants, and electronics accessory sellers.

Catalog sizes run from a few dozen products on the free tier up into the tens of thousands; it is running in production on a catalog of roughly 40,000 SKUs. The common thread is not the industry — it is that "does this fit my thing" is the question deciding the sale.

PerUnit's answer

We've shipped products with AI and watched margins disappear without knowing why. The AI bill was one number — we couldn't see which customers or features were driving it. Every product and pricing decision was a guess.

We built PerUnit so product teams can have the same clarity on AI costs that they have on revenue and headcount.

ViewForge's answer:

ViewForge came out of agency work. Normal View was building for a parts retailer running roughly 12,000 SKUs who needed fitment search, and every app we evaluated stored the merchant's compatibility data in the vendor's own database.

That is a strange trade when you look at it directly. Fitment data is genuinely expensive to produce — it is weeks of work — and the merchant would not own the result. It would belong to whichever app happened to be installed that year.

Shopify metaobjects made a different answer possible: write fitment as native structured data inside the merchant's own store. The theme reads it, the Storefront API queries it, Admin GraphQL exports it, and it is still there after an uninstall. That decision is what the rest of the app is built around.

Everything else came from real catalogs rather than a roadmap. Eight verticals exist because a tractor catalog is not Year/Make/Model. Smart Parse exists because that retailer had already written fitment into 12,000 product titles, and nobody was ever going to retype them.

PerUnit's answer

Frontend: Next.js, React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS Integrations: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google APIs, Stripe Deployment: Vercel

ViewForge's answer:

• TypeScript
• Shopify metaobjects, as the fitment data store
• Shopify theme app extensions for the storefront components: fitment search, saved-vehicle garage, compatibility table, product-page fit notice
• Shopify Storefront API, for querying fitment from the theme
• Shopify Admin GraphQL API, for writing and exporting fitment records
• NHTSA vehicle database, for VIN decoding
• ACES and PIES XML parsing, for automotive catalog import

PerUnit's answer

PerUnit is in early access. We're onboarding a small group of teams who need clarity on their AI unit economics. Our early users are founders and PMs at companies building AI features — from early-stage to growth — who want cost attribution before scaling further.