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What is your tech debt costing you in EBITDA dollars?

A calibrated estimator built on The EBITDA-DevOps Bridge. Move the sliders; see the dollar drag and exit-multiple impact in real time. No email required.

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Inputs
Estimated annual EBITDA drag
$3.60M
Roughly 96.1% of your EBITDA, or 7.68 turns of exit multiple.
On-call burden
Loaded engineering hours × interruption multiplier
$1.62M
Incident cost
Failed deploys × MTTR × team size + per-event fixed cost
$1.51M
Velocity drag
Deploy-frequency gap to target × ARR sensitivity
$400K
Coverage gap
Sub-70% coverage × regression escape sensitivity
$75K
The Tech-Debt-to-EBITDA calculator implements The EBITDA-DevOps Bridge with calibrated coefficients drawn from anonymized Human Renaissance engagements. Estimates are directionally accurate within ±25% in the $10M–$100M ARR band; at the bottom of that range coefficients tilt toward overestimating drag, at the top toward underestimating it. Calibration data refreshes quarterly inside The Tech Middle-Market Turnaround Index.
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Why this calculator exists

Most technical-debt conversations stall at "we should do something about it." The buyer's diligence team will eventually convert your engineering organization's pain into a multiple haircut — typically 1–3 turns of EBITDA depending on the depth of the debt. This calculator lets you do that conversion yourself, before they do.

How the math works

The calculator decomposes drag into four categories, each calibrated against anonymized Human Renaissance engagements: on-call burden (loaded engineering hours × interruption multiplier), incident cost (failed deploys × MTTR × team size + per-event fixed cost), velocity drag (deploy-frequency gap to target × ARR sensitivity), and coverage gap (sub-70% coverage × regression escape sensitivity). The methodology is documented in The EBITDA-DevOps Bridge; the calibration coefficients ship inside this tool.

What it doesn't capture

Architectural debt that hasn't yet manifested in incident or velocity metrics. Vendor lock-in. Security CVE backlogs without exposed exploits. The calculator gives you a defensible floor on tech-debt EBITDA drag; the diligence team will find the rest. For the full picture, request a calibrated assessment.

Want a defensible diligence-grade number?

A 14-day Human Renaissance technical due diligence engagement runs the full Bridge methodology against the target's actual code, infrastructure, and engineering org.

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