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Approval Friction Calculator

JIT approval workflows add latency to every access request. Across an engineering team, that latency compounds into real labor cost, and during incidents, into something more expensive than labor. Enter your team's parameters to see what approval friction actually costs today, and what different levels of automation would recover.

Engineering team size
Number of engineers who use JIT access regularly
Weekly access requests per engineer
Average number of JIT access requests per engineer per week
Average manual approval wait time (minutes)
Minutes from request to access grant when a human approver is in the loop. Include time to context-switch, compose the request, and wait for a response.
Automatable request percentage (%)
Percentage of requests that follow predictable, low-risk patterns a policy engine could auto-approve
Residual friction on automated requests (minutes)
Automated requests aren't instant; a policy engine still evaluates the request. Typically under a minute.
Loaded hourly engineer cost ($)
Fully loaded cost per engineering hour, salary plus overhead, not just base wage
Share of requests during declared incidents (%)
Percentage of weekly access requests that occur during an active incident, not routine work
Estimated downtime cost per minute ($)
What a minute of the affected system being degraded or unavailable costs the business, separate from engineer wages
Please fill in team size, requests per week, manual wait time, and loaded hourly cost.
Annual Cost Today
at current automation level
Annual $ Recoverable
vs. zero automation baseline
Annual Hours Lost
at current automation level
Requests per Year
total access requests

Recovery at different automation levels

AutomationAnnual hoursAnnual cost$ recovered vs. 0%
How this is calculated

Weekly requests = team size × requests per engineer per week. Each week's requests split into manual (1 − automatable%) and automated (automatable%) shares. Weekly friction hours = (manual requests × manual wait minutes + automated requests × residual minutes) ÷ 60. Annual figures multiply weekly results by 52. Annual cost = annual hours × loaded hourly cost. The zero-automation baseline applies the manual wait time to 100% of requests; recoverable $ is the difference between that baseline and the current-automation figure.

Incident exposure (if provided) applies the incident-share percentage to weekly requests, multiplies by manual wait minutes, converts to minutes, and multiplies by the downtime cost per minute. This is reported separately because it reflects business downtime cost, not labor cost, and summing the two would double-count the same time window from two different cost bases.

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