changefailurerate.com

Cost of failed changes

A defensible dollar number for the board deck. Engineering time on recovery plus customer-impact churn.

OW
Oliver Wakefield-Smith
Founder, Digital Signet. Built siemcost / monitoringcost / itbudgetcalculator.
Updated 21 Jun 2026
Direct answer
Annual failed-change cost = (failures per year × MTTR hours × responder count) × blended hourly rate, plus customer-impact churn. A 150-engineer Series-C team at 15% CFR with 95-minute MTTR typically burns $400K-$900K per year on recovery time alone, before customer effects.
Window:
0%25%50%+
14.3%
37th percentile vs 2025 DORA distribution
14
Failed
111
Total deploys
across 30 day window
Annual engineering burn at this CFR
$186,960/yr
Customer-impact churn estimate: $447,720/yr at 35% customer-facing failure rate.

Where your team plots vs DORA cohort

CFR (y) by deploys per week (x). Elite teams sit bottom-right: high throughput, low failure.

0%10%20%30%40%010204060youdeploys per weekCFR %
elite cohort high medium low your team

Would a DORA vendor pay back at this CFR?

Assumes a 40% CFR reduction (the published Sleuth median, scaled). Quote-only vendors do not display a per-seat rate.

Sleuth
pricing source
Free tier (up to 10 developers, basic DORA metrics)
Vendor / mo
$4,500
Burn saved / mo
$6,232
Payback
0.7 mo
LinearB
pricing source
Essentials $29/user/month (annual, includes 1,000 credits)
Vendor / mo
$5,220
Burn saved / mo
$6,232
Payback
0.8 mo
Jellyfish
pricing source
Quote-only (typical deals $30K-$100K+ ARR)
Quote-only vendor. We do not infer per-seat rates for this site; contact sales for a published number.
Faros AI
pricing source
Faros CE: free self-hosted. Faros AI hosted: contact sales.
Quote-only vendor. We do not infer per-seat rates for this site; contact sales for a published number.
DX
pricing source
Quote-only (positioning to 500+ engineer orgs)
Quote-only vendor. We do not infer per-seat rates for this site; contact sales for a published number.
Swarmia
pricing source
$20/developer/month (published)
Vendor / mo
$3,600
Burn saved / mo
$6,232
Payback
0.6 mo
Pluralsight Flow (Appfire)
pricing source
Quote-only (Appfire-managed)
Quote-only vendor. We do not infer per-seat rates for this site; contact sales for a published number.
Haystack
pricing source
Quote-only (per developer)
Quote-only vendor. We do not infer per-seat rates for this site; contact sales for a published number.

The math

Engineering burn is the easy part: failures × MTTR × responder count × hourly rate. The responder count is the realistic median per incident (this site caps at 8 for orgs with structured incident response). The blended hourly rate divides annual FTE cost by 2080.

Customer-impact churn assumption

The $7,500-per-customer-facing-failure mid-anchor used by the calculator triangulates from three sources: IBM's Cost of a Data Breach 2025 puts global average breach cost at $4.44MIBM Cost of a Data Breach 20252025, which is a much larger event class; SaaS churn benchmarks put single-incident churn risk at 1-3% per affected customer over 90 days; and Series-C ACVs cluster around $30K-$120K. The number is conservative; override it for your account-base shape.

Board-deck framing

Lead with the dollar figure, then the CFR percentile, then the prior-quarter delta. The dollar framing wins air-time; the percentile gives defensibility DORA 2024 Report2024.

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