Developer Portal Total Cost of Ownership Calculator
Input your organisation profile and get a 3-year TCO comparison across every platform approach. Use the quick scenarios or customise every parameter.
Your Organisation
3-Year TCO Comparison
| Approach | Year 1 | Year 2 | Year 3 | 3-Yr Total | Timeline |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Custom Build | $395K | $99K | $109K | $602K | 13 months |
| Backstage (Self-Hosted) | $376K | $144K | $151K | $671K | 5 months |
| Roadie (Managed Backstage)Lowest cost | $31K | $33K | $34K | $98K | 4 - 8 weeks |
| Commercial SaaS | $46K | $50K | $54K | $150K | 2 - 6 weeks |
| API Mgmt ExtensionNot viable | $73K | $5K | $5K | $83K | 2 - 4 weeks |
Recommended: Roadie (Managed Backstage) at $98K over 3 years
$22/developer/month, managed infrastructure and upgrades
Methodology
Custom build assumes 2 FTE engineers. Backstage includes plugin development, infrastructure, and platform team maintenance allocation. Commercial SaaS uses a blended per-seat average across OpsLevel, Port, and Cortex. Roadie uses published $22/dev/month pricing. API management extension assumes existing gateway. All approaches include 5 to 10% annual cost growth. SSO adds $10K to $20K to build approaches and is typically included in enterprise SaaS tiers.
Methodology
This calculator derives estimates from the following assumptions. All figures are estimates for planning purposes and should be validated against actual vendor quotes and your engineering team's assessment.
Engineering Costs
- Fully loaded senior engineer cost (salary + benefits + overhead)
- Custom build assumes 2 FTE engineers for the build phase
- Backstage assumes 2.5 FTE for initial setup, 35% of platform team for maintenance
SaaS Pricing
- Commercial SaaS uses a blended per-seat average ($42/user/mo)
- Roadie uses published $22/developer/month pricing
- 5 to 8% annual price increase factored for SaaS platforms
Infrastructure
- Self-hosted Backstage: $1,500/month (Kubernetes, database, CDN)
- Custom build: scaled based on team size
- SaaS and managed: included in licensing
Viability Criteria
- Custom build: requires platform team of 2+ and 6+ month timeline
- Self-hosted Backstage: requires platform team of 2+ and 3+ month timeline
- API management extension: requires existing API gateway