Free Tool · No signup
Technical Debt Cost Calculator
Put a dollar number on the legacy code, slow deploys and recurring incidents your team is paying for every year. Then see what a paid-down debt program actually returns. We've remediated debt for clients running 10-year-old PHP, .NET, Java, and FreeSWITCH stacks, and we are happy to walk through your numbers.
Engineering team
$
%
Things work, but velocity is dropping and small changes carry risk.
Reliability & incidents
$
hrs
Business impact
$
mo
$
$
Remediation program
$
%
Annual cost of tech debt
What it's costing you today
Total annual debt cost
$0
Calculating…
Engineering time drag$0
Incidents$0
Deploy friction$0
Feature delay (revenue)$0
Churn / revenue at risk$0
Hiring / attrition premium$0
After remediation program
$0 / yr saved
Remediation budget$0
Residual annual debt cost$0
--
3-year ROI of remediation
--
Payback period
Email me the full report
We'll send the full model, sensitivity table and a one-page brief you can take to your CFO. No spam, no resale.
Assumptions & methodology
- Engineering time drag = engineers × cost × % time lost to debt.
- Incidents = number of incidents × average cost per incident.
- Deploy friction = deploys/week × hours wasted × 52 × engineer hourly rate.
- Feature delay = months delayed × monthly revenue tied to those features.
- Codebase health tags add a small uplift (Amber 1.1×, Red 1.3×) to reflect compounding fragility.
- Saved per year = total annual debt cost × % recovered.
- 3-year ROI = ((Saved per year × 3) − Remediation budget) / Remediation budget × 100.
- Payback (months) = Remediation budget / (Saved per year ÷ 12).
- Conservative 0.7× / Optimistic 1.3× multiplier applied to the total annual debt cost.
- These figures are decision support, not a guarantee. Numbers stay in your browser.
Free consultation, no commitment
Ready to pay down
your tech debt?
We've done legacy modernization for PHP, .NET, Java, FreeSWITCH and other older stacks across the UK, US and UAE. Book a free 30-minute call.