ROI Calculator
What Does Building It Yourself Really Cost?
Set your team size, average salary, and which services you need. We'll show you exactly what in-house development costs — and what Launch Rail saves you.
Your Engineering Team
3 eng
Engineers dedicated to building infrastructure services
1 eng20 eng
$120K/yr
Includes base salary — we'll add 30% for benefits, tooling & overhead
$60K/yr$300K/yr
Services You Need to Build
Select the domains your team would need to build from scratch. Each includes estimated build months based on industry averages.
Your Savings Breakdown
Build Cost (Year 1)
$328K
build + maintenance + overhead
Launch Rail (Year 1)
$5K
everything included
You Save
$323K
99% cost reduction in year one alone
Time to Ship
7 months
vs. building in-house
With Launch Rail
≤ 1 week
fully integrated
Build Cost
$273K
engineering + overhead
Annual Maintenance
$55K
20% of build cost
4 services selected · 11.5 total engineer-months to build
Identity & AuthEntitlements & PlansNotifications (Email/SMS/Push)Audit Log
Calculator Assumptions
- Build months per service based on real-world SaaS infrastructure averages
- 30% overhead added for benefits, tooling, cloud infra, and PM time
- 60% parallelism factor applied across your team size
- Annual maintenance estimated at 20% of initial build cost
- Launch Rail pricing reflects the annual Complete Ecosystem tier
- Does not include ongoing feature requests, security patches, or on-call time
Beyond the Numbers
What the Calculator Can't Quantify
The real cost of building in-house goes far beyond salaries.
Time to Market
- Every month of delay = missed market opportunity
- Competitors ship features while you build auth
- Deploy all 14 services in ≤ 1 week with Launch Rail
- Focus 100% of engineering on your core product
Ongoing Opportunity Cost
- Senior engineers maintaining CRUD vs. building differentiators
- On-call rotations for infrastructure you don't own
- Security patches, dependency upgrades, breaking changes
- Knowledge silos when engineers leave
Strategic Leverage
- Source code ownership — no vendor lock-in ever
- Horizontal scaling built in from day one
- Enterprise-grade from the start: SOC2, HIPAA ready
- Full team remains focused on revenue features
Ready to Ship Faster?
Stop Building Infrastructure. Start Shipping Product.
The math is clear. Every day your team spends building auth, audit logs, or notifications is a day not spent on your core product. Launch Rail gives you everything, immediately.