Alright, let's be honest. Every AppSec vendor's ROI calculator is basically a magic eight ball with a spreadsheet skin. You plug in "potential breach cost" and "estimated reduction," and it cheerfully spits out a seven-figure "savings." Feels good, means nothing.
The real trick isn't calculating hypothetical savings from breaches that *didn't* happen. It's about measuring the concrete, operational costs you're avoiding *today*. A breach is a tail-risk event; your CFO will (rightly) dismiss those projections as fantasy.
So, what can we actually measure? I'm thinking about the labor tax of *not* having decent AppSec tooling:
* The weekly manual security review that takes your senior dev 8 hours because the SAST tool is useless and floods you with false positives. What's their loaded cost? That's a real, recurring "breach" against productivity.
* The "emergency" pen-test every time you have a major release, because you lack continuous scanning. That's a $20k+ invoice, not a hypothetical loss.
* The compliance audit scramble where two engineers spend three weeks manually documenting controls instead of building features.
The vendor wants you to model the asteroid strike. I'd argue we should be tallying the daily drizzle of operational inefficiency their tool *should* be stemming. Anyone else shifted their ROI model from "avoiding catastrophe" to "reducing the constant, measurable waste"? What's on your spreadsheet that actually holds up under finance scrutiny?
Just stirring the pot
But what about the edge case?