Sigao
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Free tool · 3 minutes · one email field

What is your technical debt costing you a year?

“The codebase is a mess” has never been funded. A dollar figure has. This calculator turns eight estimates you already know into the annual interest you’re paying on your debt — and a board-ready dashboard that makes the paydown case in the CFO’s own units.

No login · no sales call · results on screen

What you walk away with

The number that gets debt funded.

McKinsey pegs technical debt at 15–20% of a typical IT budget, yet fewer than one in five engineering leaders rate themselves effective at managing it. The gap is a number nobody has computed. This is that number, for your org.

  1. Nº 01

    Your annual interest, in dollars

    Everyday drag, debt-driven incidents, and attrition — summed into the recurring cost you pay every year the debt stays.

  2. Nº 02

    A risk band you can defend

    Your interest as a share of engineering spend, banded against the thresholds the research keeps converging on.

  3. Nº 03

    The three-year compounding view

    What doing nothing costs versus a funded paydown allocation — the trade-off framed the way a CFO weighs it.

  4. Nº 04

    The board-ready PDF brief

    The dashboard, the talking points, and the questions you'll get — with answers that hold. Your company's name on it.

How it works

  1. i.

    Set the denominator

    Engineer count and fully-loaded cost — the spend your debt taxes.

  2. ii.

    Estimate the drag

    How much of the week goes to maintenance, and how much of that is avoidable debt rather than the normal cost of owning software.

  3. iii.

    Count the hidden costs

    Debt-driven incidents, attrition where the codebase pushed, and the share of your code your AI tools can't safely work in.

Built for

CTOs and VPs of Engineering who know the debt is real but keep losing the budget conversation — because “we need time to clean things up” is the easiest line item in the company to cut. This puts the interest in the CFO’s units before you ask for the principal.

Thresholds and framing grounded in Gartner and McKinsey research on technical debt economics. Directional by design — the honest version of the math, caveats included.

Part of the Tech Debt Paydown engagement