About

I build and ship small products for markets outside the country I live in. That means every order I sell gets billed three times before I see the money: once to produce it, once to move it across a border, and once to collect it.

None of those three bills is hard to find on its own. What is hard is the sum. Tariffs are published as a rate against a classification code, payment fees as a percentage plus a fixed fee plus a currency spread collected by a third party, and software as a subscription tier that has no relationship to the work being done. Three documents, three units, no total.

Tarvolo exists to produce the total: one real transaction, published numbers, and the amount that actually leaves the account.

The three sections

• The AI Cost Lab — what production tooling costs per task. Subscriptions converted into the price of one page, one image, one video.
• The Duty Desk — what a border costs per order. Duties, the end of de minimis, clearance, and the paperwork that goes with them.
• The Money In — what collection costs per dollar. Processing fees, currency spread, withdrawal, and the fee nobody quotes up front.

How the numbers are checked

• Rates come from primary sources: vendor pricing pages, the Federal Register, CBP guidance, and platform fee schedules. Where a source is secondary, the post says so and names it.
• Each post carries the date the figures were checked, at the top. A number without a date in this category is a rumour.
• Where a source publishes no figure, the post states that instead of estimating one.
• Token counts, character counts, and FX conversions are estimates and are labelled as estimates, because tokenisers and spreads differ by provider and by day.
• Labour costs and hourly rates are explicit assumptions, written into the post so you can substitute your own.

What this is not

Not legal, tax, or customs advice, and not a broker. Tariff classification, bonded entry, and VAT registration are the kind of thing where being wrong is expensive; a post here can tell you the size of a bill, not how to file it. For anything that ends up in a customs declaration, use a licensed broker.

Corrections

Rates in this category move faster than any article about them — by executive order, by fee schedule revision, by court ruling. If a number here is out of date or wrong, it is worth fixing. The useful version of this site is the accurate one, not the flattering one.

Disclosure

No affiliate relationships on this site's pages as of November 2026. If that changes, the disclosure goes at the top of the post it applies to, not buried in a footer.