Technical Debt Calculator
Assess your codebase health in 2 minutes. Get a debt score, estimated cost, and a prioritized action plan.
Codebase Age
How old is the core codebase?
Test Coverage
What's your automated test coverage?
Deployment Frequency
How often do you deploy to production?
Bug Rate
How many production bugs per month?
Onboarding Time
How long for a new developer to make their first meaningful commit?
Dependency Health
How current are your dependencies?
Documentation
How is your technical documentation?
Code Duplication
How much copy-paste code exists?
Build Time
How long does a full build/CI take?
Developer Satisfaction
How does the team feel about the codebase?
Estimated Annual Cost of Debt
Technical debt slows your team down. Estimate the productivity loss.
Your technical debt costs approximately
$0
per year in lost productivity
Prioritized Action Plan
What is Technical Debt?
The hidden tax on every feature you ship.
Technical debt is the implied cost of future rework caused by choosing a quick solution now instead of a better approach that would take longer. Like financial debt, it accumulates interest: the longer you leave it, the more expensive it becomes to fix.
It shows up as slow builds, brittle tests, spaghetti code, outdated dependencies, and developers who dread touching certain parts of the system. Left unchecked, it slows feature delivery, increases bug rates, and drives away your best engineers.
3 Strategies to Reduce Technical Debt
Dedicate 20% of each sprint
Reserve one day per week or 20% of sprint capacity for debt reduction. This prevents debt from compounding while keeping feature delivery on track. Treat it as non-negotiable, not a stretch goal. Teams that do this consistently ship faster within 2–3 quarters.
Strangle the monolith
Don't rewrite from scratch. Use the strangler fig pattern: wrap legacy code with clean interfaces, then replace modules one at a time. Each replacement is a small, low-risk deployment. Over months, the old code shrinks until it disappears entirely.
Automate the safety net
Invest in CI/CD, automated testing, and linting before tackling debt. Without a safety net, refactoring is gambling. With 80%+ test coverage and a 5-minute build pipeline, you can refactor confidently, catch regressions immediately, and ship changes the same day.
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