Decision

Cost-Benefit

Monetize costs vs. benefits over time

Best for: justifying or killing an investment
Time: 1–2 hr
Difficulty: Intermediate

Example

Justifying a migration to a managed Postgres provider over 3 years

Costs (over 3 yr)

Vendor fees ~ $180k
Migration engineer time ~ $90k
Re-training for ops team ~ $15k
Risk of one-week regression in latency

Benefits (over 3 yr)

On-call hours saved ~ 1200 hrs (~$240k)
Faster recovery cuts a $50k/yr outage risk
Frees 1.5 FTE to ship features
Compliance posture improves for enterprise deals

Related frameworks

Pareto Analysis

80/20 vital few vs. trivial many

Expected Value

Σ probability × outcome

Weighted Decision Matrix

Decision matrix with criterion weights

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