The Real Cost of DevOps

Let’s do the math that nobody wants to talk about.

The DevOps Engineer Bill

A single DevOps engineer in the US costs:

Item	Annual Cost
Base salary	$140,000
Benefits (30%)	$42,000
Equipment & tools	$10,000
Training & conferences	$8,000
Total	$200,000

But wait—you can’t run infrastructure with one person. You need at least 2-3 for coverage, oncall, and specialization.

Real cost: $400,000 - $600,000/year

Beyond Salary: Hidden Costs

Your DevOps team also needs:

• Infrastructure costs: Cloud bills that nobody understands
• Tool subscriptions: Datadog, PagerDuty, Jenkins, etc.
• Recruitment costs: Finding DevOps talent takes 3-6 months
• Opportunity cost: Engineers fixing infra instead of building product

What Do They Actually Do?

Let’s break down a typical DevOps engineer’s week:

• 40%: Maintaining existing infrastructure
• 25%: Deploying and updating applications
• 20%: Firefighting incidents
• 10%: Actually improving things
• 5%: Documentation (if you’re lucky)

Most of their time is spent on maintenance, not innovation.

The InfraPilot Alternative

Traditional DevOps	InfraPilot
$500K/year team	$50-200/month
Weeks to deploy	60 seconds
24/7 oncall burden	We handle it
Complex maintenance	Automatic updates
Knowledge silos	Self-service

When You Actually Need DevOps

To be fair, you might still need DevOps engineers if you:

• Run massive scale (millions of users)
• Have extremely custom infrastructure needs
• Build infrastructure as your core product

For everyone else? There’s a better way.

The Bottom Line

A Series A startup deploying 10 tools shouldn’t spend $500K/year on infrastructure.

Deploy those same 10 tools with InfraPilot for under $500/month.

Calculate your savings →