TCO Calculator
Calculate the Total Cost of Ownership for your technology stack. Compare PHP against Node.js, Python, Ruby, and Go with real numbers.
Project Parameters
Number of developers on the project
Total lifespan of the project
Number of production servers needed
Cost Comparison
Developer Cost
€825,000
Hosting Cost
€10,800
Total TCO
€835,800
Developer Cost
€1,050,000
Hosting Cost
€21,600
Extra vs PHP
+€235,800
Developer Cost
€975,000
Hosting Cost
€21,600
Extra vs PHP
+€160,800
Maximum potential savings with PHP
€380,400
over 3 years compared to most expensive alternative
Cost Breakdown Details
Developer Salaries Used
Average European salaries based on Stack Overflow 2024 Developer Survey:
Hosting Costs Used
Average monthly hosting cost per production instance:
* PHP benefits from widespread hosting support and can run on inexpensive shared hosting for smaller projects.
The Composer Ecosystem
PHP's mature package ecosystem reduces development time and cost significantly.
Packagist serves over 2 billion package downloads per month
Ready-to-use components for virtually any need
Symfony components alone account for ~25% of all Packagist downloads
Composer launched in 2012, building on PHP's 30-year ecosystem
Why This Matters for TCO
Don't Reinvent the Wheel
- HTTP clients, caching, validation, serialization -all solved
- Security components audited by thousands of developers
- Symfony components used by Laravel, Drupal, Magento, and more
Enterprise-Grade Quality
- Semantic versioning with backward compatibility promises
- Professional long-term support (LTS) releases
- Security advisories and automated vulnerability scanning
Hidden TCO factor: The mature Composer ecosystem means your team spends time building business value, not infrastructure. Symfony components alone save hundreds of development hours per project -that's real money not reflected in basic salary calculations.
Calculation Methodology
What's Included
- Developer salaries - Based on European averages from Stack Overflow 2024 survey
- Infrastructure costs - Production hosting including servers, load balancers, and basic DevOps
What's Not Included
- Training and onboarding costs
- Third-party services and licenses
- Recruitment and hiring costs (PHP has advantage here too)
- Time-to-market opportunity costs
Note: This calculator provides estimates for comparison purposes. Actual costs vary significantly based on location, project complexity, team seniority, and specific requirements. Consider consulting with a technology advisor for detailed analysis of your specific situation.
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