A 2,800-test suite burns 90 hours a release when regression is manual.
Watch an automated suite lap yours in 28 seconds — below.
Make every number on this page yours
Set your team's reality — every number below responds. A bigger suite even pays back faster, spreading the one-time framework build over more tests. (Your hourly rate scales the dollars, not the timing.) Totals are whole-team hours and dollars.
that's ≈ 2 min/test. A bigger suite pays back faster — it spreads the one-time framework build over more tests.
Where the hours actually go
A single manual regression cycle, step by step.
-
01
Write & maintain test cases
Specs drift, cases rot. Someone reconciles them by hand.
~5.9 hrs / release -
02
Execute manually
Click, type, compare, repeat — 500 cases, one pair of eyes at a time.
~7.9 hrs -
03
Log & triage bugs
Reproduce, screenshot, write steps, file, argue severity.
~1.8 hrs -
04
Regression re-test
Every fix risks a new break. Re-run the affected areas. Again.
~2.3 hrs
Total: 18 hrs per release · 72 hrs per month
Same suite. Same clock. Different century.
One regression cycle, manual vs automated — the automated lane keeps lapping.
press play — or just scroll, it starts itself
Testing that lives inside the pipeline
Scroll to walk the pipeline.
Testing triggers on every push — not on a test plan someone has to remember to run.
The artifact that gets tested is the artifact that ships. No "it worked in staging."
500 tests, run in parallel, on every build. A failure blocks the merge — with a trace, screenshots, and the exact commit attached.
Release day becomes a merge, not a weekend. 47% of teams postpone releases over manual-testing bottlenecks — this is the fix.
Where automation pays first
Manual time vs automated time, for the coverage that earns its keep soonest.
The full safety net, every release.
4 browsers ≠ 4× the work — run them in parallel.
Contract checks under the UI — where bugs are cheap to catch.
2 hrs × 20 builds/month = 40 hrs. Automated: ~1 hr total.
The honest chart: automation isn't free
Upfront scripting costs real weeks. Maintenance runs 10–20% ongoing — we model 17%, the upper-middle of that range. Here's when it pays back anyway, with your numbers.
Your annual number
Pre-filled from your inputs above. Deliberately conservative: only 80% of the suite is worth automating, scripting each automatable case is a real one-time investment (~30 min), and a 17% ongoing maintenance tax comes off the top. These are whole-team hours and dollars — split the upfront across your engineers and it lands sooner.
In the 0 seconds you've been on this page, a manual tester finished 0 test cases. An automated suite ran 0.
Who builds this
Cale Maynard — Senior Automation Engineer (SDET), 10+ years. I led a Selenium → Playwright migration (35% faster regression), authored 5,000+ tests, and build agentic AI pipelines on the side.
This page is itself the demo: vanilla JS, zero dependencies, no tracking, under a second to load — and covered by its own Playwright suite. View source.
That's — hours back, every year.
Happy to talk through what your suite would actually take.
Let's talk automation