Maintain
Maintenance cost per year
Maintenance effort at the effective hourly rate, plus any tokens consumed by AI-driven repair.
- Unit
- money per year
- Where you enter it
- Computed; shown on the Maintain and Total Cost tabs.
What it means
Maintenance effort per year converted to money at the effective hourly rate, plus the yearly cost of tokens where an AI tool re-generates or heals cases. It recurs every year of the horizon and is one of the four lines in the annual ongoing cost.
Why it matters to the cost
This is the line that most often reverses a licence-based ranking: a tool with the higher fee and the lower maintenance cost overtakes the cheaper licence somewhere in year two or three, which is exactly what the cumulative chart shows.
Typical values
For a 300-case suite at $120,000 per FTE: roughly $2,000–$4,000 a year for AI-native tools; $10,000–$17,000 for script-based tools; $25,000 or more for a homegrown framework.
Typical values describe a category of tool — AI-native, codeless, script-based, homegrown, manual — never a named product. Why we do not price named products.
Where it appears in the model
Maintain — continuously
- cases to repair
- Total test cases × Test breakage rate
- cases healed
- Total test cases × Self-healed cases per year
- Maintenance effort per year
- cases to repair × Repair time per case + cases healed × Review one heal + Platform upkeep per year + New cases added per year × Build a new case
- Maintenance cost per year
- Maintenance effort per year × Effective hourly rate + Token cost
Totals, per application
- Annual ongoing cost
- Run cost per year + Maintenance cost per year + Licensing and infrastructure (allocated)
- Analysis horizon
- Build cost + Annual ongoing cost × years in the horizon — the total over the horizon
Every name is a link to its definition. See the whole model.
Try it with your numbers
Maintenance cost per year is a row in the calculator. Change it and every total on the page moves with it — free, in your browser, nothing to install.
See how maintenance cost per year impacts the calculation of test automation costsLast reviewed 2026-09-15. All terms.