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Technology Carve-Out Economics: The Hidden Costs of Separation

Carving out a technology business costs 2-5x what the financial models predict.

By Richard Ewing·

Why Carve-Outs Are Expensive

Financial models predict: 6-12 months, $2-5M. Reality: 12-24 months, $5-15M. Hidden costs: shared service decomposition, data migration, license renegotiation, identity/auth separation, monitoring stack duplication, CI/CD pipeline separation, and team knowledge transfer.

The most expensive surprise: shared databases. Separating a shared database takes 6-12 months and costs $1-3M alone.

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Published Work

This article expands on ideas from my published work in CIO.com, Built In, Mind the Product, and HackerNoon. View published articles →

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Richard Ewing

The Product Economist — Quantifying engineering economics for technology leaders, PE firms, and boards.