AI Coding Assistant ROI Calculator
Every Copilot ROI calculator online is built for a manager justifying a team license. This one is for the developer paying for it personally - enter your subscription cost, your hourly rate, and the hours it actually saves you each week. Nothing uploaded.
Verdict
The Numbers
Learn more: is your AI coding assistant paying for itself
The breakeven number is smaller than it looks
The calculator turns a weekly time estimate into a monthly dollar figure. Hours saved per week are multiplied by 4.33, the average number of weeks in a month, then by your hourly rate. The subscription cost comes off that total to give the net monthly value.
Take a $19 monthly subscription, an hourly rate of $75, and 2 hours saved per week. That is 8.7 hours a month, worth $649.50, leaving $630.50 once the subscription is paid.
The breakeven point is subscription cost divided by hourly rate, which comes to about 15 minutes a month at those numbers. The tool only shows that line when the net is negative, since above breakeven it stops being the interesting figure.
Where the estimate breaks down
Everything here rests on the hours-saved number you type in, and that is the number people get wrong. Writing code was rarely the bottleneck, so it is easy to feel faster at the keyboard while shipping at the same pace.
Faros AI ran the same arithmetic in its breakdown of AI assistant productivity claims: "At $19 per month per developer, if an engineer earning $150,000 annually saves just two hours per week through AI assistance, that's roughly $7,500 in recovered productivity per year." Enter $72 an hour (a $150,000 salary over 2,080 hours) and 2 hours a week here and the monthly value comes to $623.52, or $7,482 across a year before the subscription is taken off.
Their argument is about what happens after that. Individual speed gains show up in team output only once the review and release steps that follow the code get faster too, which is not something a per-seat subscription changes on its own.
FAQ
How should I measure hours saved per week?
Track a week or two of comparable work without the assistant, then a week or two with it. Rough numbers are fine, but the result scales directly with what you enter: a 25% overestimate on hours becomes a 25% overestimate on monthly value, so round down when you are unsure.
What if I'm salaried rather than hourly?
Divide your annual salary by 2,080, the hours in a standard 40-hour work year, and enter that as your hourly rate. A $150,000 salary comes to about $72 an hour.
Does this measure team-wide productivity?
No. This is a personal breakeven calculation for one subscription and one person's time. Whether individual time savings turn into faster team delivery depends on downstream capacity such as code review, which this calculator does not model.