ROI CALCULATOR
The cost of poor planning
Unclear specs cost you in four places, and none of them appear on an invoice. Put in your team and salaries to see what they cost today, and what it costs to stop.
Your team
Salaries are fully loaded: pay plus employer costs, per person.
Plansmith seats
Everyone on the team gets a seat. Planners and 20% of engineers plan on full seats; the other engineers follow along on comment-only seats. Team plan, billed yearly.
Fine-tune the assumptions
Time per spec, rework and coding agents. The defaults are estimates; replace them with what you see on your own team.
Writing a spec & prototyping
Questions back and forth, per spec
Rework
Coding agents
Planner output
4.3x
Each planner writes build-ready specs and prototypes 4.3x faster: 13 hours a spec and prototype today, 3 with Plansmith.
- Net benefit, a year
- $4,430,462
- Recovered
- $4,554,462
- Plansmith costs
- $124,000
- Return on investment
- 35.7x
- Pays back in
- 2 weeks
An illustrative model, not a customer result. Team time is valued at salary; only wasted agent runs are cash. Change any input to fit your team.
Where the value comes back
Per year, on one scaleStress-test the two assumptions that carry the case
Two assumptions carry the model: how much engineering capacity rework eats today, and how much of it Plansmith removes. Here is the recovery across their plausible range, with everything else held at your inputs. Figures are per year.
| Capacity lost to rework | Cut by 20% | Cut by 30% | Cut by 40% |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10%, a disciplined team | $2,704,000 | $2,889,000 | $3,074,000 |
| 20% | $3,074,000 | $3,444,000 | $3,814,000 |
| 30%, base case | $3,444,000 | $3,999,000 | $4,554,000 |
| 40% | $3,814,000 | $4,554,000 | $5,294,000 |
Salaries are fully loaded: base pay plus employer costs, usually about 1.3x base. The model spreads them over 2,080 working hours a year to price the per-spec time. Seats are the Team plan, billed yearly. Spec volume of 1920 a year assumes 4 per planner per month. The per-spec hours are estimates to replace with your own during a pilot. Rework percentages are ranges and not measurements, which is why the stress test is there. No figure here is an industry benchmark presented as fact.
ECB rate, 2026-10-07: €1 = $1.1177. Plansmith bills in US dollars. Seat prices and your custom amounts use this rate. Preset salaries use regional estimates, so the business case changes with currency.
Where the money goes today
Ambiguous specs never show up as a line item. They cost capacity in four places.
- 01
Writing specs & prototyping
A planner hand writes the spec, structures it, and breaks it into tickets.
Skilled product time goes on formatting and decomposition instead of judgement.
- 02
Questions back and forth
An engineer hits an ambiguity, asks, waits, switches context, resumes.
You pay twice: the engineer's blocked time and the planner's interrupted time.
- 03
Rework
The feature ships, then is reworked because it met the ticket but not the intent.
The most expensive defect. It consumes full delivery capacity before anyone notices.
- 04
Wasted agent runs
A coding agent takes a vague ticket down the wrong path and the output is thrown away.
The only metered cost. Vague input turns straight into billed tokens you discard.
What this model leaves out
Four real benefits are left out. They are harder to defend in a finance review, and the case does not need them.
- Cycle time
- Shipping the same roadmap sooner has revenue value we have not attempted to price.
- Retention
- Rework is among the most commonly cited sources of engineering frustration.
- Escaped defects
- Spec errors that reach production cost materially more than those caught in delivery.
- Token efficiency
- Better structured specs should cut agent token use. That is for a pilot to measure, not a spreadsheet to assert.
Where the plan gets good.
Start with your business requirements. Review the Specs and prototype, resolve open questions, and hand off a plan your dev team can build.