AI Code Review: Build vs. Buy Calculator

12-month Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) including engineering maintenance. Hover any ? for details.

Can you dedicate 1–2 days/week (20–40% of 1 person) to own internal review maintenance? AI Ops Readiness Gate: Building an internal review bot requires a named owner (with backup) spending 1–2 days/week curating rules, suppressing false positives, and evaluating quality. Without a dedicated owner, internal bots decay into ignored noise within 60 days.

Active Developers Active Developers (N_devs): Number of engineers actively submitting and reviewing PRs/MRs. Drives commercial vendor seat licenses and team-level context maintenance (~1 squad per 7–8 devs). 60

Vendor Seat Price / Yr Annual Vendor Seat Quote (P_vendor): Commercial AI code review price per developer per year. Standard tiers average ~$400/dev/yr; enterprise quotes typically range from $500 to $700/dev/yr. $700

MRs / PRs per Month Monthly Reviews (M_reviews): Total pull/merge requests reviewed across your organization per month (benchmark: ~10–15 MRs per developer/month). Directly drives internal LLM API & CI runner compute cost. 720

Internal Maint (1–2 d/wk) All-In Internal Maintenance (D_maint_build): Centralized weekly time (1–2 days/week = 20–40% of 1 Senior Engineer) spent curating rules, maintaining context/skills, and reviewing nightly MR reflection across the org. 1.5 days/wk

Token Cost / Review Compute Cost per Review (C_token): Average LLM API token + cloud CI runner compute cost per internal merge request review (~$1.70/review from production benchmark). $1.70

Senior Eng Daily Cost Daily Engineering Cost (C_eng_day): Loaded annual Senior Engineer salary divided by 250 working days (e.g., $100,000/yr = $400/day). Used to price both centralized internal maintenance and vendor context tuning. $400/day

Setup & vendor maintenance assumptions

Vendor Maint / Team Vendor Context & Skill Maintenance: Commercial tools are not zero-maintenance—each squad (~7–8 devs) still spends ~5% of 1 engineer's time (~2 hrs/wk or ~$5k/team/yr) maintaining repo context files, skills, and tuning vendor rules. 5% (~2h/wk)

Initial Build Setup Initial v1 Build & Mining (D_setup): One-time Year 1 engineering days (10–15 days) to mine 6–12 months of historical merged MRs for defect patterns and deploy the shared cloud CI review agent. 12 days

Buy Vendor Tool

$82,000 / yr

$1,367 per dev / yr

Seat licenses (60 devs)$42,000

Context & skill maint (5%/team)$40,000

Core rule engineVendor

Build Internal Agent

$49,488 / yr

Year 2+: $44,688 / yr

LLM tokens (720 MRs/mo)$14,688

All-in maint (1.5 d/wk)$30,000

Initial v1 setup$4,800

Decision Position vs. Crossover Zone Crossover Spectrum: Shows how far your organization is from the Break-Even Crossover Zone where centralized internal build cost equals vendor seats + ongoing vendor context maintenance. Break-even at ~35 devs

You

◀ Buy Zone (Vendor Cheaper) Crossover (~35 devs) Build Zone (Internal Advantage) ▶