Business & money

AI Code Assistant ROI

Seat price is almost never the deciding factor. Adoption, the share of the week spent writing code, and review drag are.

Developers on the teamLoaded cost per developer (USD/hour)Salary plus benefits, equipment, management and overhead.Week actually spent writing code — 45%Meetings, reviews, planning and support eat most of the rest.Speedup on that coding time — 20%Independent studies land between 10% and 30% on real codebases.Daily adoption — 75%Gain lost to reviewing AI output — 20%Seat price (USD/dev/month)

Annual net value

$153,795

Hours saved / dev / week: 2.7
Hours saved / year: 1,863
Value of time saved: $158,355
Annual seat cost: $4,560
ROI: 3,373%

Break-even speedup

0.43%

The assistant only has to make coding time this much faster to cover its own seat price.

Overwhelmingly positive — seat price is noise next to loaded engineering cost.

Reading the break-even number

For most engineering teams the break-even speedup comes out around one percent. That is the real argument for these tools: the seat costs roughly what a developer is paid for fifteen minutes, so it only has to save fifteen minutes a month to be free.

The risks are elsewhere. Review drag is genuine — accepting plausible-looking code that nobody understands generates defects later. Keep the drag slider honest, and pair the rollout with a rule that the author must be able to explain every accepted suggestion.

Hours saved are not the same as features shipped. Delivery speed is usually bounded by review, testing and decision-making, not typing. Directional model, not financial advice.