The Rent Multiplier Calculator

Every software subscription is you renting another company's product team. Add the tools you actually pay for and see what the whole stack is worth: the people, the years of work already spent, and the money that funded it.

(vendor headcount × average salary) ÷ your annual bill = your rent multiplier.

How to read your numbers

Thousands-to-one or better: keep renting. Someone else's payroll is doing your engineering, and no custom build will beat that economics for what the tool does.

Person-years is the number that ends the argument. Headcount tells you who is on payroll today. Person-years tells you how much work is already banked in the product before you ever signed up. It's the honest answer to "could I just build this myself?" The figure is halved (headcount × company age ÷ 2) because a company does not employ its current headcount on day one.

The two walls that justify walking away anyway: hard data ceilings you can't archive around, and needing to own 100% of your external users' experience. Price alone is almost never the reason.

The catch: the day you leave a platform, you inherit everything it was silently doing for you: security, backups, uptime, access control. Renting isn't just cheap. It's insured.

This calculator was built for a specific piece: The $135 Million Argument for No-Code. It covers when no-code wins, when custom wins, the two walls that actually justify leaving a platform, and the security checklist you inherit the day you do.

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Headcounts, founding years and funding totals are verified mid-2026 figures, each with a source on file. They move monthly; the order of magnitude is the point. Salary defaults to $150K, deliberately conservative: Airtable's median engineer package alone is $415K per levels.fyi. The multiplier counts only the tools you have priced.