What That Project Actually Earns
Price minus salary is not margin. Add bench time and recruitment, then compare it against a white label quote for the same scope.
The calculator
Change any figure and the comparison updates. Every number is yours, and nothing is prefilled with a Devbion rate.
Your numbers
What you invoice the client for the whole project.
Salary cost of the people who would build it, for the time it would take them. Direct labour only.
Share of paid developer time that is not on billable client work. Holiday, gaps between projects, internal work, rework.
Hiring cost attributable to this project. Agency fee or advertising, plus your own time, spread across the work that hire will do.
What a delivery partner quotes you for the same scope. Use a real quote you have been given. This field is not prefilled with any Devbion rate.
What it works out at
Headline in-house margin
Price minus salary. The number most agencies quote.
40.0%
True in-house margin
Same work, with 25% bench time and recruitment included. Bench alone adds $4,000.
5.0%
White label margin
Price minus the quote. No bench, no recruitment.
45.0%
On these numbers white label keeps $8,000 more of this project than building it in-house.
Illustrative. Every figure above is one you entered, and the defaults are round placeholders rather than benchmarks. Nothing here is a Devbion rate, an industry average or a claim about what your agency should charge. It also ignores tax, overhead, payment terms and the value of keeping the capability in-house, all of which move the answer.
Send yourself these figures
We will reply with the numbers above and what we would quote for a scope like it. No sequence, no newsletter.
How it calculates
Headline margin
Project price minus the salary cost of the people who would build it. This is the number most agencies quote and it is the one the tool is arguing with.
True in-house margin
The same cost divided by one minus your bench rate, plus the share of recruitment attributable to the work. Bench does not add cost, it removes hours to carry it.
White label margin
Project price minus the quote you were given. No bench, no recruitment, no notice period, because you are buying delivery rather than holding capacity.
What moves it most
Bench time, by a wide margin. It is also the figure agencies track least precisely, which is why the comparison so often looks closer than it is.
Calculator FAQs
Because bench time does not add cost, it removes the billable hours you spread that cost over. If a quarter of a developer's paid year goes to holiday, gaps between projects and rework, everything you do bill carries the whole salary. Cost per billable hour rises by one over one minus the bench rate: at 25 percent bench, a third more, not a quarter.
A share of it, yes. Hiring costs real money in fees, advertising and your own time, and it is a cost of holding the capacity rather than of any one project. Spread it across the work that hire will actually deliver, which is what the field asks for. If you expect ten projects before they move on, put a tenth in.
No, and it would be worth nothing if it did. Enter a low bench figure and a high white label quote and it will tell you to build the work in-house, because on those numbers you should. A calculator that only produces one answer is a sales page with input boxes. What the arithmetic actually shows is that the comparison turns on bench time more than on hourly rates, which is the part agencies rarely price.
Because there is no way to calculate a white label margin without one, and prefilling it with our own number would make the tool an advertisement. Devbion publishes prices for two productised services, website maintenance and the AI code audit. Project work is quoted, because scope moves the number more than anything else does. Use a real quote you have been given, from us or from anyone else.
Tax, overhead, payment terms, the cost of managing a subcontractor, and the value of keeping a capability inside the business. All of those move the answer and none of them can be estimated for you. The tool is meant to correct one specific error, which is treating price minus salary as margin. It is not a full model of your agency's economics and it should not be used as one.