What is a platform worth to your team?

The value comes from five places, each tied to a product feature. Enter your team’s numbers and the calculator sizes each one. SaaS and self-hosted return the same gains; only the run cost differs.

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The formula

Gross value is what you get back each year. Against it sit what you spend to run the platform and the one-time work to adopt it. On SaaS the run cost is admin time only.

Gross value      = P + W + A + I + U
Net of run cost  = Gross value − O − R      (R applies in year one only)

Platform time saved

(teams × share of time on infrastructure code − people maintaining shared bundles) × yearly engineer cost

Today each team maintains its own infrastructure code. With Massdriver a small central team publishes bundles once to the registry and every instance consumes them, and release channels push an update to every consumer.

Developer wait removed

infra requests per year × hours saved per request × rate

Developers deploy themselves inside ABAC policy instead of filing a ticket. Environment fork and project clone remove the request for a new environment entirely.

Access and audit work

(access changes × hours each + SCIM events × 1 + audit hours) × rate

Custom attributes and policies grant access to new projects automatically, so nobody hand-edits permissions. SCIM removes join and leave tickets. The audit log records about 70 event types for evidence.

Change failures avoided

failures per year × cost per failure × fraction avoided

Plan before apply, propose and approve, separation of duty, decommission protection, rollback, and environment compare. Use your own incident numbers.

Idle cloud spend removed

cloud spend in scope × idle fraction found

Cost per package from the AWS and Azure ingest, rolled up per environment and project, plus environment decommission and alarms. Five percent is a conservative default.

Run cost

Self-hosted: cluster + database + buckets + (ops engineer fraction × engineer cost). SaaS: admin engineer fraction × engineer cost

Self-hosted, you run the Helm chart, Argo Workflows, Postgres, and three S3 buckets. On SaaS you only spend admin time. Either way this is your own cost, separate from the Massdriver price.

Adoption

hours to write first bundles and move first projects × rate (year one)

Roughly 8 hours per bundle and 20 hours per project. Resource import brings live infrastructure under governance without a redeploy, which keeps this number down.

Value calculator

Start from an example or type your own numbers. Each field says what to count. Everything recalculates as you type.

Start from an example:

Customershared inputs

Will you run Massdriver on your own cluster, or use our SaaS?

Only the run cost changes.

What do you spend on AWS, Azure, and GCP per year for the teams that would use this?

What does an engineer cost you per hour, fully loaded?

$/ hr

Salary plus benefits divided by 2,000. A $200k engineer is $100 an hour.

P · Platform time saved$60,000

How many teams write and maintain their own Terraform, Helm, or other infrastructure code today?

How much of each team’s time goes to infrastructure code instead of the product?

FTE

One day a week is 0.2. Half a person is 0.5.

With Massdriver, how many people would maintain the shared bundles for everyone?

FTE

Usually one or two per hundred engineers.

W · Developer wait removed$45,000

How many times a year does a developer ask for infrastructure?

A new environment, a database, a queue, a bucket, network access. Count the tickets, or estimate per team per month.

How many hours does the developer lose per request?

Count the wait, the back and forth, and the workaround, not the ops team’s time.

A · Access and audit work$14,000

How many new projects or environments get created a year?

Each one needs someone to set up who can access it.

How long does it take to grant and review access for one of them?

How many people join, leave, or change teams each year?

Each one is an access ticket today. Zero if you do not use an identity provider like Okta.

How many hours a year go into pulling evidence for auditors?

Who changed what, who approved it, who has access to what.

I · Change failures avoided$24,000

How many infrastructure changes broke something last year?

Outages, rollbacks, a bad config that took production down.

What did one of those cost?

Lost revenue, the people on the call, and the cleanup. If you do not know: $10k for a small shop, $50k or more for a regulated one.

What share would a plan review, a second approver, and a one-click rollback have caught?

40% is a conservative default.

U · Idle cloud spend removed$20,000

What share of your cloud bill is idle?

Forgotten dev environments, oversized databases, orphaned resources. 5% is conservative; most audits find 10 to 30.

O · R · Your costsyear one $52,000

What will it cost per year to host Massdriver yourself?

A small Kubernetes service, a Postgres database, and three storage buckets. Self-hosted only.

How much of a person will keep Massdriver running?

FTE

Self-hosted: upgrades, backups, the cluster, about a quarter of a person. SaaS: admin only, about a tenth.

How many hours to write the first bundles and move the first projects?

About 8 hours per bundle and 20 hours per project.

Gross value, per year

$163,000

P + W + A + I + U

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Engineering time (P + W + A)$119,000

Risk and spend (I + U)$44,000

Net of run cost, year one$111,000

Net of run cost, year two$131,000

GainsYour costs

$60k

$45k

$14k

$24k

$20k

$32k

$20k

Show as a table

Term	Inputs	Amount
P · Platform time saved	(4 teams × 0.15 FTE − 0.3 FTE) × $200,000	$60,000
W · Developer wait removed	150 requests × 3 h × $100	$45,000
A · Access and audit work	140 h × $100	$14,000
I · Change failures avoided	6 × $10,000 × 40%	$24,000
U · Idle cloud spend removed	$400,000 × 5%	$20,000
Gross value		$163,000
O · Run cost	$12,000 + 0.1 FTE × $200,000	$32,000
R · Adoption	200 h × $100	$20,000
Net of run cost, year one	gross − O − R	$111,000
Net of run cost, year two	gross − O	$131,000

Submit to receive a quote

Send us your details and we reply with a quote for your team. Your answers above come with the request, so we arrive at the first call already knowing your setup.

Your answers

Value calculator answers
Will you run Massdriver on your own cluster, or use our SaaS? Self-hosted
What do you spend on AWS, Azure, and GCP per year for the teams that would use this? $400,000
What does an engineer cost you per hour, fully loaded? $100 / hr
How many teams write and maintain their own Terraform, Helm, or other infrastructure code today? 4
How much of each team’s time goes to infrastructure code instead of the product? 0.15 FTE
With Massdriver, how many people would maintain the shared bundles for everyone? 0.3 FTE
How many times a year does a developer ask for infrastructure? 150
How many hours does the developer lose per request? 3 h
How many new projects or environments get created a year? 30
How long does it take to grant and review access for one of them? 2 h
How many people join, leave, or change teams each year? 0
How many hours a year go into pulling evidence for auditors? 80 h
How many infrastructure changes broke something last year? 6
What did one of those cost? $10,000
What share would a plan review, a second approver, and a one-click rollback have caught? 40 %
What share of your cloud bill is idle? 5 %
What will it cost per year to host Massdriver yourself? $12,000
How much of a person will keep Massdriver running? 0.1 FTE
How many hours to write the first bundles and move the first projects? 200 h
Gross value per year: $163,000
Net of run cost, year one: $111,000
Net of run cost, year two: $131,000

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