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Enter how many developers you have, how much time each loses to friction, and what a platform team would cost. You get the yearly value of the time given back, the net return, and the number of developers at which the team breaks even.
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Share on XShare on LinkedInA platform team is an investment in other people's time, which makes it hard to defend in a budget meeting. The case rests on one number: hours each developer loses every week to things that are not their job. Waiting for a CI run, requesting an environment, chasing access, filing a ticket with another team to change a DNS record. Five hours a week across 120 developers is fifteen engineers' worth of time, every week, spent waiting.
A platform team does not recover all of it, and the calculator asks you to say how much. Be conservative: a team that removes forty percent of the friction for a hundred developers pays for itself several times over, while the same team serving twenty developers does not. That is the reason platform teams appear at a certain company size and not before. The break-even line shows where that size is for your numbers. Below it, buy a managed platform or assign part of a senior engineer's time instead.
Estimate whether a platform team pays for itself: the developer time it gives back, set against what the team and its tooling cost. Also shows the size of engineering organisation at which it breaks even.
Waiting on CI, environments, access, and tickets to other teams.
Be conservative: not all friction is fixable.
Assumes 46 working weeks a year and that recovered hours turn into useful work. Not counted: fewer incidents, faster onboarding, and lower cloud spend, which are often why platform teams are funded.