Code Technical Debt Cost Estimator
The annual salary cost of technical debt in your codebase.
Technical debt: the silent budget drain
Technical debt is code that works today but is expensive to maintain tomorrow. A codebase with 30% debt means 30% of developer time is spent fighting the codebase instead of building features. At $130k/dev with 8 devs: $312,000/year in "hidden tax."
The compound interest problem
Like financial debt, technical debt compounds. Shortcuts make future shortcuts harder to avoid. A team that doesn't pay down debt year over year can find themselves spending 50%+ on maintenance — making new feature development effectively impossible.
McKinsey estimates the average company has $500M–$1B in technical debt. Startups typically carry 20–30% debt ratio after 3–4 years. Addressing technical debt reduces bug rate by 15–25% and speeds feature delivery by 20–40%.
