Tech consulting · Calculator
Cost of doing nothing.
Most teams know their tooling is costing them. Few have ever put a number on it. Move the three sliders and watch the annual figure update. The maths is on the page — no black box.
Inputs
People affected by the tool you'd replace.
Time per person spent fighting the tool, redoing work, or waiting on it.
Fully-loaded cost per hour: salary + super + on-costs. Default $80 is a typical Australian mid-grade staffer.
Annual cost
$199,680
That is what the current arrangement is costing the business every twelve months. Every week of inaction adds another $3,840.
- Equivalent to
- 2.1 FTE
- Or roughly
- 111 days
Mid-grade Australian salary at $95k.
of focused build work from a small studio.
Assumptions
How the number is built.
Formula
annual_cost
= 52 × team_size
× hours_lost_per_week
× hourly_costLinear. No discount factor for partially-recovered hours, no fudge factor for "but the team is still productive". The point is to land an honest order-of-magnitude — not a fictional three-decimal-place answer.
What we are not counting
- Opportunity cost of the work the team would have done with those hours back. Usually larger than the labour cost itself.
- Morale tax. People who fight tooling all day eventually leave. Replacing one mid-grade hire costs a year of that person's salary in recruitment plus ramp time.
- Compounding error. Hours lost to bad tooling are also hours spent introducing data-entry mistakes that someone has to fix later.
- Downstream impact on customers. Slow internal tools usually mean slow customer responses.
How we'd use this
- 01 We treat the number above as a budget ceiling. If a fix costs less than one year of doing nothing, the business case is already made.
- 02 Most of our internal-tooling rebuilds pay back inside six months on this maths. Some inside three.
- 03 If the figure looks too high to be true, run the calculator with half your team and half the hours. The answer is usually still uncomfortable.