Recruitment is the most expensive line item nobody puts on the P&L. The average tech hire costs $4,700 in fees and time, takes 23 days, and 40% of those hires churn within a year.
Plug your numbers into the calculator below to see what booking instead of hiring saves your team.
Numbers are rough; treat as a starting point for your own modeling. Real savings depend on your churn rate, salary band, and how aggressively you ship.
Time-to-shipping cost: every day a feature isn't shipping is a day of opportunity cost. Most early-stage teams value an engineer-day at $400-$800 in avoided opportunity cost.
Recruitment cost: external recruiters charge 15-25% of first-year salary; in-house recruiters cost ~$4,700 fully-loaded per hire (Glassdoor 2025).
Bad-fit cost: 40% of new tech hires don't make it past 12 months. Each early exit costs ~3 months of fully-loaded salary in ramp time + departure cost.
Cadence eliminates the recruitment cost entirely (we charge 20% of weekly billing, only when you have an active engineer) and reduces bad-fit cost via the 48-hour trial. Booking is also 4-7x faster than hiring, recapturing the time-to-shipping cost.