Infrastructure should be 5-15% of total engineering budget. Most startups overspend.
Infrastructure (cloud, tools, CI/CD, monitoring) should be 5-15% of total engineering budget. Below 5%: you're under-investing in developer experience. Above 15%: you're over-provisioning or using wrong services.
Common overspend causes: production-grade infrastructure in staging/dev (use smaller instances), unused resources nobody decommissioned, enterprise tools when open-source alternatives work, and over-provisioned databases "just in case."
Like this analysis?
Get the weekly engineering economics briefing — one email, every Monday.
Subscribe Free →What you measure at seed is different from Series A, which is different from growth.
13 minEngineering budget allocation templates for every funding stage, with benchmarks.
12 minVenture studios build 4-6 products per year with shared engineering. Here's the economics.
9 minPublished Work
This article expands on ideas from my published work in CIO.com, Built In, Mind the Product, and HackerNoon. View published articles →
The Product Economist — Quantifying engineering economics for technology leaders, PE firms, and boards.