Hard Costs
Work done by professional services
The percentage of a phase’s hours — build, run or maintenance — the vendor’s services team does instead of your own people.
Also called: outsourced share · managed-service share
- Unit
- percent of a phase’s hours
- Where you enter it
- One row on each of the Build, Run and Maintain tabs, per vendor. The value applies to every application the vendor is in.
What it means
Three percentages per vendor, one for each phase. Each is the share of that phase’s person-hours the services team takes on: half the build, say, or all of the run for a managed-service arrangement. The hours themselves come from the same inputs as before — cases times build time, failures times triage time — and are then divided. The services share is priced at the professional services rate; the remainder is your team at your effective hourly rate.
A share applies to every application the vendor is a column of. A manual approach can carry one too: fully outsourced manual testing is a run share of 100 per cent at the outsourcer’s rate.
Why it matters to the cost
Without a split, a quote that includes 200 hours of vendor onboarding either double-counts those hours at your rate or is quietly left out of the comparison. With it, the calculator charges only the hours you actually staff to your team, shows the rest as an invoice, and removes the invoiced hours from build duration and FTE demand — which is the difference between a build your two engineers can finish before the next release and one they cannot.
Typical values
Zero for a tool your team adopts on its own; 30–70 per cent of the build for a vendor-led implementation; up to 100 per cent of run and maintenance for a managed service.
Typical values describe a category of tool — AI-native, codeless, script-based, homegrown, manual — never a named product. Why we do not price named products.
Where it appears in the model
Hours you buy from the vendor instead of staffing
- services hours
- a phase’s effort × Work done by professional services for that phase
- Labour cost
- (effort − services hours) × Effective hourly rate — only your own team’s hours
- Professional services cost
- services hours × Professional services rate + Professional services package — the package lands once, in year 1
- Build duration
- Σ your team’s Build effort ÷ FTE capacity — services hours are invoiced, not staffed
Every name is a link to its definition. See the whole model.
Try it with your numbers
Work done by professional services is a row in the calculator. Change it and every total on the page moves with it — free, in your browser, nothing to install.
See how work done by professional services impacts the calculation of test automation costsLast reviewed 2026-09-16. All terms.