Under performance-guaranteeing contracts, such as availability-based contracts, the Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) have become increasingly concerned with understanding and managing the cost of their commitment to deliver specific results to customer through-life. However, current approaches to cost estimating hardly offer more than sheer claims of the existence of a link between cost and organizational performance – no matter whether products, services or product-service-systems (PSS) are at stake. This paper presents an intermediate step towards a computational structure explicitly linking cost and performance for PSS. A PSS is represented formally as a system combining assets and activities delivering the results OEMs are committed to through-life. Inter-temporal aspects of PSS provision which typically define the successful delivery of an asset’s availability are taken into account. Network formalism and principles derived from Input-Output Analysis are employed to base PSS cost estimation on a representation of a PSS as a ‘system’.