TechPar

Benchmark total technology cost against stage-adjusted ranges. Built for IC packages, board reporting, and sell-side preparation.

How to use TechPar

TechPar benchmarks your total technology cost against stage-adjusted ranges derived from KeyBanc, OpenView, Bessemer, and GST engagement data.

Who it's for: PE deal teams, portfolio company CTOs and CFOs, and board-level reporting.

What you'll need: Annual recurring revenue (ARR) and monthly infrastructure spend at minimum. Additional cost categories (personnel, R&D, CapEx) unlock deeper analysis.

How it works: Select your company stage, enter revenue and costs, and TechPar computes a blended technology cost ratio with zone classification, gap analysis, and 36-month trajectory projection.

Step 1 of 4

Company profile

Stage and revenue drive all benchmark ranges. Everything else adapts to what you enter here.

Company stage (required)
Sets benchmark ranges and zone thresholds for your growth stage.
Industry
Adds industry-specific context to the analysis. Benchmark ranges remain the same across industries.
Display currency
Display only. All values remain in your local currency.
Revenue
$
Annual recurring revenue or trailing twelve months. All benchmarks are expressed relative to this figure.
Revenue growth assumption
%
Used in trajectory projections. Does not affect current-period KPIs.
×
Revenue multiple at exit. Used in exit value calculations.
Historical data (optional)

Add 1-2 prior fiscal years to show actual trajectory on the chart. Enter the annual ARR and total technology spend for each year.

Step 2 of 4

Technology costs

Enter annual spend across each cost category. Infrastructure hosting is required. All others are optional and unlock additional KPIs.

Input mode
Deep Dive breaks R&D into sub-categories and unlocks the revenue-per-engineer KPI.
Infrastructure and hosting
$/ mo
Cloud, data center, CDN, observability, managed services. Auto-converted to annual.
Infrastructure personnel
$
DevOps, SRE, platform engineering, cloud architecture headcount.
R&D OpEx
$
Engineering and product headcount plus tooling subscriptions. Annual fully-loaded.
R&D OpEx breakdown
$
Salaries, benefits, and contractor costs for software engineers. Annual fully-loaded.
$
Product managers, designers, and QA. Annual fully-loaded.
$
IDEs, CI/CD, monitoring, SaaS dev tools, and license fees. Annual cost.
R&D OpEx total: —
Engineering headcount
Number of full-time-equivalent engineers. Unlocks the revenue-per-engineer KPI on the Analysis tab.
R&D CapEx
$
Enables GAAP view toggle above and CapEx-of-R&D benchmark.
Step 3 of 4

Analysis

Technology cost structure benchmarked against stage-adjusted ranges.

Enter ARR on the Profile tab
to compute TechPar.
—
total technology cost as % of revenue
0% ▼ midpoint 150%
Cost category vs benchmark
Stage benchmarks: total technology cost
Seed / Pre-A60–100%
Series A45–75%
Series B–C35–55%
PE-backed25–40%
Enterprise18–32%
Ranges informed by KeyBanc SaaS Survey (2024), OpenView Benchmarks (2024), Bessemer State of the Cloud (2024), and GST engagement experience (2023–2025). Benchmarks are reviewed annually. Individual results vary based on business model and organizational structure.
These benchmarks are derived primarily from SaaS company data. Companies operating marketplace, fintech, infrastructure, or hardware-intensive models may observe materially different cost structures. Apply professional judgment when benchmarking outside a pure-SaaS context.
How TechPar works

Benchmark sources

Ranges are informed by KeyBanc SaaS Survey (2024), OpenView Benchmarks (2024), Bessemer State of the Cloud (2024), and calibrated against GST engagement experience (2023–2025). Benchmarks are reviewed annually and represent the interquartile range of technology cost as a percentage of revenue at each growth stage.

Zone threshold derivation

Each company stage defines five thresholds that partition spend into six zones. The healthy range (low/high) represents the benchmark interquartile range. Below that, an underinvestment floor flags spend levels that may constrain engineering velocity or platform reliability. Above the healthy ceiling, the above-par, elevated, and critical thresholds flag increasingly significant cost drag. Thresholds are stage-specific: early-stage companies carry higher healthy ranges (60–100% at Seed) than mature companies (18–32% at Enterprise).

Gap calculation

The 36-month cumulative excess is computed by projecting monthly revenue forward at your stated growth rate, then summing the difference between your technology cost ratio and the stage ceiling in each month where spend exceeds the ceiling. For PE-backed and Enterprise stages, this excess is multiplied by the exit multiple to estimate the implied impact on recoverable exit value.

Trajectory projections

The trajectory chart projects a constant technology cost ratio against growing revenue over 36 months. It assumes costs scale linearly with revenue at the current ratio. Actual trajectory depends on optimization decisions, scaling dynamics, and organizational changes not captured in this model.

Limitations

TechPar provides a directional benchmark, not a precise diagnostic. It does not account for one-time costs, migration expenses, or business-model-specific factors. Category benchmarks assume a SaaS-oriented cost structure. Results should be interpreted alongside qualitative context and validated against company-specific circumstances.

Step 4 of 4

Trajectory

36-month projection of total technology cost against the stage-adjusted healthy range.

Enter your ARR on the Profile tab
to generate trajectory.
Ranges shown are total technology cost as % of revenue