Complexity Tax Calculator

An explorable explanation of over-engineering costs

Let's say you're building a with a team of 2 people.

You've decided to run 3 services on , with 4 environments (dev, staging, QA, prod, etc).

Your local development uses , and you've built 3 abstraction layers (repositories, services, DTOs, etc).


Your complexity tax

Based on your choices, you're spending approximately 8.5 hours/week on complexity overhead.

of a 40-hour week

That's 442 hours per year, or 55 workdays not spent on your actual product.


Where the time goes

Infrastructure maintenance +2.5 hrs
Environment coordination +1.5 hrs
Local dev friction +2.0 hrs
Abstraction navigation +1.5 hrs
Context-switching tax (services × envs) +1.0 hrs

The simpler alternative

If you ran 1 service on a PaaS with 2 environments (dev + prod), using native tooling and 0 abstraction layers:

8.5
hrs/week now
1.0
hrs/week simpler

You'd recover 390 hours/year — that's ~10 weeks of full-time work back to building product.


When complexity is worth it