What is your backlog actually costing you?
Every untouched issue carries a cost — the developer hours it will eventually take, sitting frozen on a board. Move the sliders to see the carrying cost of your backlog, and how much an autonomous AI engineer would clear from it.
Bugs, small features, test gaps, and tech debt sitting untouched.
Hands-on hours a developer spends on a typical backlog issue.
Hourly cost including salary, benefits, and overhead.
Estimate only. Assumes Codowave ships roughly 65% of a typical backlog (the well-defined bugs, endpoints, tests, and small refactors) at about $3 of compute per merged PR on BYOK Claude. Your mileage depends on how well-scoped your issues are.
How the estimate works
Carrying cost is the simplest piece: open issues multiplied by the hands-on hours each one takes, multiplied by a fully-loaded engineer rate. That is the labour locked inside your backlog, whether or not anyone has scheduled it.
For the “cleared” figures we assume Codowave ships the well-defined slice of a typical backlog — bug fixes, new endpoints, missing tests, and small refactors — at roughly $3 of BYOK Claude compute per merged PR. Ambiguous or architectural issues still want a human, so the calculator deliberately leaves them out of the cleared count.
It is an estimate, not a quote. The real number depends on how well-scoped your issues are — which is also the single biggest lever on how much an agent can do for you. See clearing a GitHub backlog with Codowave for the full mechanics.