Most engineering leaders know their costs. Few know how much of it is waste.
Take a mid-size engineering org: 100 developers, 8 platform/ops engineers, $80K average fully loaded salary, $1M annual cloud spend. Typical numbers.
We ran formulas grounded in DORA research and industry benchmarks:
| Where you should save | Annual savings |
|---|---|
| 1 Developer Productivity (8% gain) | $640,000 |
| 2 Ops Efficiency (40% capacity freed) | $256,000 |
| 3 Cloud Waste (10% eliminated) | $100,000 |
| 4 Security & Compliance | Not calculated |
| Total | $996,000 |
Nearly $1M/year. Using the conservative end of every benchmark. The fourth category — often the largest — isn't even in the total.
The numbers aren't surprising because the math is clever. They're surprising because this waste is so normalized that nobody thinks to measure it. You can plug in your own numbers in the ROI calculator and see what yours looks like.
Let's break down the math — and the hidden dynamics that make these numbers real.
1 Developer Productivity
DORA research shows developers spend 30–40% of their time on non-feature work: setting up environments, waiting on tickets, debugging pipelines, reverse-engineering how other teams configured things.
The counterintuitive part: this isn't a tooling problem, it's a coordination problem. Every team reinvents the same wheel independently. Facets doesn't make developers faster — it removes the work that was never theirs to begin with.
In Facets, this takes the form of blueprints — standardized, reusable infrastructure definitions that any developer can provision without filing a ticket. The environment they get in 3 minutes is identical to the one that used to take 3 days.
Formula: developers × fully loaded salary × 8%. We use 8%. Industry benchmarks show 12–15% with mature adoption.
2 Ops Efficiency
The paradox of most ops teams: they're too busy handling tickets to build the automation that would eliminate the tickets.
Facets breaks this cycle by flipping the model. Instead of ops doing the work, ops defines the rules — and the platform enforces them. Developers get self-service. Ops gets their calendar back.
The key enabler is standardization through reusable infrastructure modules. Instead of each project wiring up its own database, cache, queue, and deployment pipeline from scratch, teams compose from a shared library of vetted, production-grade modules. This eliminates the drift that creates most ops tickets in the first place.
Facets does this through a control plane with declarative guardrails. Ops teams define reusable modules and encode standards once. Every subsequent project inherits them automatically — consistent infrastructure across every team, no ticket required.
Formula: ops engineers × salary × 40% capacity freed. Industry benchmarks show 50–60% toil reduction. We use 40%.
3 Cloud Waste
The average organization wastes 10–15% of its cloud spend. Some of it is obvious — orphaned environments, forgotten test clusters, load balancers fronting decommissioned services. But the bigger share is subtler: oversized instances running at 15% utilization, and on-demand pricing for workloads that could run on spot.
Two levers account for most of the savings: rightsizing (matching instance specs to actual usage instead of "just in case" overprovisioning) and spot/on-demand mix (running fault-tolerant workloads on spot instances at 60–90% discount). Most teams don't use either — because without a platform enforcing standards, nobody has the visibility to act on them.
Facets blueprints solve this structurally — every environment is created, tracked, and torn down through the same control plane. Standardized definitions make rightsizing auditable and spot adoption safe, because the platform manages the lifecycle instead of relying on tribal knowledge.
Formula: annual cloud spend × 10%
4 Security & Compliance
We leave this out of the calculator because the numbers vary wildly. But it's often the largest category. A single breach can cost more than the other three combined.
The insight: security and compliance savings are standardization savings in disguise. When every environment is provisioned from the same blueprint with access controls, secrets management, and audit trails built in, the "security review" becomes a formality — because the platform already did it.
Facets builds this in through policy-as-code governance and RBAC integration. Platform teams define compliance standards in reusable modules — so every provisioned resource is compliant by default. Developers get self-service access through pre-approved templates, while audit logs capture every action across the control plane. The result: security that scales without becoming a bottleneck.
Every benchmark above is the conservative end of the published range. The real number for your org is probably higher.
Run the Numbers for Your Org
Four sliders, three calculations, one uncomfortable truth about your budget.