Resources / QE Cost Calculator
The annual cost of QE capacity, on your numbers
Three ways to buy the same testing capacity: hire, contract, or bring in a managed partner team. This calculator compares them with figures you control and arithmetic shown in full. It asserts no market data and prefills no vendor's price, including ours.
How this calculator treats numbers
- Your numbers only. Every field is editable. The prefilled figures are round-number examples so the math has something to show; replace them with what you actually pay.
- No market data asserted.We hold no salary surveys or rate benchmarks on our evidence register, so this page cites none. An example marked “e.g.” is an illustration and never a statistic.
- No vendor prices prefilled. We publish no rates and will put no number in the partner column for you. It takes a written quote, from us or from anyone else.
- Math in the open. Every line shows its own formula with your current inputs, so you can rerun the whole model in a spreadsheet and get the same totals.
- Currency-agnostic. Figures display with a dollar sign; enter amounts in whatever currency you buy in and read the totals the same way.
The calculator
Side by side
- In-house hires
- $593,000
- Hourly contractors
- $584,400
- Managed partner team
- awaiting your quote
On the numbers entered, a year of this QE capacity costs about $593,000 in-house and $584,400 with hourly contractors. On these numbers, hourly contractors is the lowest at $584,400 per year. Enter a written partner quote to complete the third column; nothing is prefilled there because no vendor price is asserted on this page.
This is arithmetic on your inputs and nothing more. It says what each option costs, never what each delivers per dollar; that judgment needs references, sample deliverables, and evidence, which is why we publish ours.
The costs the first spreadsheet forgets
Most build-vs-buy comparisons start and end at salary times headcount. The line items below are the ones that surface later in the budget year, which is why the calculator carries each as a toggle you can price or exclude.
- Recruiting
- A QE hire costs money before day one: agency fees, engineering hours spent interviewing, and offers that fall through. Budgets that start at the salary line miss it.
- Ramp-up
- New hires draw full cost from day one and reach full output months later. Multiply your typical ramp months by monthly cost and it becomes a real line item, especially with attrition refilling seats.
- Management overhead
- Someone runs the team: hiring, planning, reviews, unblocking. That share of a manager's or lead's year belongs in the comparison because a managed partner carries it inside the fee.
- Tooling & infrastructure
- Licenses, device farms or grids, and CI capacity are paid per seat whether the seat is an employee or a contractor. Ask any partner whether tooling sits inside their fee.
- Attrition & backfill
- Every departure restarts recruiting and ramp, and takes product context with it. For contractors the same cost appears as re-sourcing and overlap time when someone rolls off.
Cost is half the decision
The totals above say nothing about what each option delivers, so judge that the way you would judge us: on evidence. The automotive and banking case studies show what a standing QE team delivers in scope terms (we publish no outcome percentages we haven’t measured), the Managed Teams page explains the accountability model behind the third column, and the evidence register documents how every claim on this site gets checked before it ships.
Fill in the third column
Scope a managed QE team with us and you'll have a written annual figure to drop into the calculator, next to any other vendor's.