Hourly contractors might seem like a cost-effective way to build, maintain, and manage comprehensive end-to-end test coverage without taking on the overhead of an in-house team, but there are several hidden costs you might not be aware of.
On top of the hourly rate to write and maintain the tests, you should expect to pay for extra test runs and the ability to run tests in parallel, both of which will add up fast if you plan to ship quickly.
Using this calculator you’ll be able to estimate the up-front and ongoing costs of an hourly QA contractor. When you’re ready, schedule time with our sales team to see how much QA Wolf will save you.
80% is considered a good goal for end-to-end testing.
Team size is a helpful way to estimate an app's complexity and needs. More.
2 hours per test case is about average for an hourly contractor.
$65/hour is a global average for an hourly contractor. More.
This could be the period between significant releases (e.g., 2 sprint releases per month), or more frequently. More.
An hour per test is a good estimate, particularly if the contractor rounds up to the next hour.
Integrated pipelines will deploy 3–5 times per day, non-integrated maybe 1–2.
Expect to pay about $116 per parallel run per month with other providers. More.
We’ve found that team size is a pretty reliable indicator of how complex your application is, and how many test cases you’re likely to need. For an application to have 80% end-to-end test coverage, expect to need about 25 tests cases per developer.
$65/hour is a global average for traditional outsourced QA based on quotes received from QA firms across Latin America, the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Although this rate doesn't reflect the true cost of outsourced QA firms which often need a lot of hands-on management and coaching.
As your application changes, the tests need to be updated or they start to flake. Most outsourced QA will only update broken tests on a standard schedule, and between those periods the tests may break and stop catching bugs.
Parallelization becomes more and more critical as your team grows so your developers avoid blocking each other during test runs. It also becomes more expensive. As of January 2022, the two biggest cross-browser testing platforms were charging $116 per parallel test run per month for enterprise customers.
QA Wolf is a hybrid platform & service that helps software teams ship better software faster by taking QA completely off their plate.
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