Most tech debt is invisible because it's never been priced. List the items, estimate the friction in hours per week per affected person, get a real annual cost — and a triage that tells you which to pay down now, which can wait, and which to ignore.
For each item, name what it is, estimate hours per week per person it costs, and how many people are affected. The math is intentionally rough — the point is to make the cost visible, not to be precise to the dollar.
Be loose with the numbers. If a manual workaround costs "about an hour a week" across "three or four people," put 1 and 4. The point is order-of-magnitude visibility, not actuarial precision.
"Annual cost" undersells the real impact. The dollar figure captures direct time. It doesn't capture the slowdown effect on new work, the morale cost, or the risk of something breaking. Treat the number as a floor.
Triage isn't ranking — it's deciding what to do. "Ignore" is a legitimate answer for stable, low-touch debt. "Pay down now" is a legitimate answer for a small item with a high interest rate. Don't try to fix everything; fix what costs the most per week.
The calculator surfaces the cost. A 30-minute Discovery Call surfaces what the team isn't telling you — the debt that's hidden behind shrugs, the ones that compound into something worse, and the surgical fixes that cost a week and save a quarter.
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