SaaS Companies
Find Out What Technical Debt
Is Really Costing You
Answer 5 quick questions. We'll show you how much of your engineering budget is going to firefighting instead of features.
Question 1 of 5
How many engineers are on your team?
FREE · 5 QUESTIONS · NOTHING SAVED UNTIL YOU ASK
Technical debt is a line item, it is just not on any invoice
Every sprint, some portion of your engineering budget goes to bugs, firefighting and working around decisions made two years ago. Nobody writes that down as a cost, so it never gets weighed against anything. This calculator converts it into the number your finance team already understands: dollars per month.
The method is deliberately simple. Take your team size and fully loaded cost per engineer, apply the share of each sprint that goes to maintenance rather than new features, and you have the monthly spend on standing still. A team of nine with a quarter of each sprint lost to firefighting is spending a quarter of its engineering payroll on work that ships no new value.
Two things make the number worse over time. The first is codebase age, because workarounds accumulate and each one makes the next change slower. The second is whether you have a written plan to pay the debt down. Teams handling it reactively pay more, because they only address debt when it has already broken something, which is the most expensive moment to do it.
Questions people ask about this calculator
Is all technical debt worth paying down?
No. Debt in code you rarely touch costs you almost nothing. Debt in the paths you change every sprint compounds fast. The useful question is not how much debt you have, it is how much of it sits in the way of the work you actually do.
How do I estimate the percentage of a sprint lost to debt?
Look at the last few sprints and count the tickets that were bug fixes, regressions, or tasks that took far longer than estimated because of existing code. You do not need precision. The difference between 10 percent and 30 percent is what matters, and teams usually know which end they are at.
What is a healthy level?
Somewhere around 10 to 15 percent of capacity on maintenance is normal and sustainable for a product in active development. Consistently above 30 percent means the codebase is setting your roadmap rather than the other way around.
Is a rewrite the answer?
Usually not. A full rewrite stops feature delivery for months and tends to reproduce the original problems with newer tools. Incremental replacement of the worst-affected paths delivers the same benefit without pausing the roadmap.
How do I make the case to non-technical stakeholders?
Stop describing it as code quality and start describing it as capacity. This calculator gives you a monthly dollar figure and an equivalent headcount, which is a far easier conversation than explaining why a refactor matters.