How long until this machine pays for itself?
Whether you're sizing up a machine you haven't bought yet or checking on one you already run: the price and a few honest numbers in, months to payback out. No signup, and your numbers never leave this page. The math runs right here.
Bare numbers are fine. Dollar signs and commas get ignored either way.
Your estimate
The answer shows up here as you type.
This is an estimate. It knows the numbers you typed and nothing else.
Free, from VENDBase · Also free: the keep-or-pull checker
What payback actually depends on
The formula is short. Monthly gross sales, minus what the product cost you, minus the fees you pay each month, leaves operating profit. Divide the machine's price by that profit and you have months to payback. The formula is not the hard part. The numbers are.
Buying first and doing the math second is the expensive order. Before the purchase, the price is the number you know and monthly sales is the number you do not, and nobody can honestly hand you that number, because the location decides it more than the machine does. That is why this page compares sales levels you set instead of promising you a typical one. Run the levels, then ask the harder question: not "what will it do" but "what does it need to do", and whether a spot within reach can support that. A deal that only works at your top level is a bet on the location, not the machine.
Product cost is where payback math usually goes wrong. This page starts you at 40 percent so the math moves the moment you type a price, and that starting point is a guess, not a fact about your route. Your real number moves with every wholesale price change, every case bought on sale, and every item that expires in the machine before it sells. If you have never worked out your true cost per vend, pull one restock receipt and do it once. A miss of ten points on product cost can move a payback estimate by months.
Fees are the quiet one. Card processing, software, a commission to the host location if you pay one, insurance if you carry it. None of them feels big on its own, and together they decide whether a slow machine is a small earner or a slow leak. The $40 in the fee box is a starting point so the page can answer at all; the answer worth trusting uses the number off your own statements. If you do not log fees, your payback answer is wrong in the optimistic direction, which is the worst direction to be wrong in.
And an average is still an average. One strong month at a new location is not a run rate. Three or four months of real sales make this estimate worth trusting; one week of them does not.
That is the honest limit of any one-page tool. VENDBase, the CRM this page comes from, watches actual sales and actual restocks per machine, so it sharpens toward true per-machine profit as you use it. Real numbers replace guesses one restock at a time. The live demo shows that computed on a real route's data, not typed into boxes.