Know what engineering work actually costs
Cost per story point. Cost per feature. Cost per milestone. TheMetrics turns the ClickUp data your team already produces into engineering cost visibility — no timesheets, no consultants, no spreadsheet archaeology.
14-day free trial · No credit card · Team-level analytics, not surveillance
Every dollar traced to the work that consumed it — by team, initiative, or client. No timesheets.
- Platform rebuild
- $412k 32%
- Customer commitments
- $338k 26%
- Keeping the lights on
- $291k 23%
The problem
Finance sees payroll. The board sees features. Nothing connects them.
Engineering is usually the biggest line item in the budget — and the least explained. Finance can tell you what the team costs per month. The roadmap can tell you what shipped. But when the board asks "what did that feature cost us?" or "is our delivery getting more or less efficient?", most engineering leaders are left estimating in the hallway.
The data to answer properly already exists in your task management tool: what was delivered, by whom, over what period. TheMetrics connects that delivery record with your cost baseline and capacity model, so every roadmap item carries a defensible price tag.
The model
From salary baseline to cost per feature, traceably
Every number can be traced back through the model — the opposite of a consultant's one-off spreadsheet.
Cost baseline
You provide loaded engineering costs — real salaries or role bands, plus overhead. This stays under your control.
Capacity model
Available engineer-time per period, after meetings, support, and leave — the honest denominator. See capacity.
Delivery record
Tasks, story points, sprints, and milestones read from ClickUp with read-only OAuth. No new data entry for the team.
Roll-up
Effort × loaded rates roll up the work hierarchy: task → feature → milestone, with distributions and outliers visible.
The answers
Cost questions you can finally answer with numbers
Each metric is defined in the engineering metrics glossary.
Cost per story point
"A point costs us about $700." Suddenly a 120-point epic is an $84k decision — and estimation drift shows up as a cost trend.
Cost per feature & epic
Roll-ups across the work hierarchy answer "what did this roadmap item cost?" with a distribution, not a shrug.
Milestone & project cost
Planned versus actual spend per milestone, with outlier tasks flagged before they quietly eat the quarter.
OpEx allocation
Engineering operating expenses allocated to the work actually delivered — by team, initiative, or client.
Cost trends & governance
Cost per unit of delivery, quarter over quarter. The efficiency conversation gets data instead of anecdotes.
Velocity, costed
Velocity and planned-versus-delivered per sprint — with the price of each sprint next to it.
Team patterns, not individual surveillance. Cost analytics are presented at the team and work-item level. Reports show what work costs — not what individuals earn, and not who to blame. That principle is core to how we build TheMetrics.
FAQ
Engineering cost tracking questions, answered
How do you calculate engineering cost without timesheets?
TheMetrics combines your loaded engineering cost baseline (salaries, benefits, overhead) with a capacity model and the work your team already records in ClickUp — tasks, story points, sprints, and milestones. Effort flows through the capacity model into loaded rates, then rolls up the work hierarchy. Nobody fills in a timesheet.
What can we see the cost of?
Cost per story point, average task cost, cost per feature or epic, and cost per milestone — each with distributions and outlier detection, so a single runaway task can't hide inside an average. You can also track how cost per unit of delivery trends quarter over quarter.
Are individual salaries visible in the reports?
Cost analytics are presented at the team and work-item level. Salary inputs are provided by you and used to compute loaded rates; reports show what work costs, not what individuals earn. TheMetrics is built for team patterns, not individual surveillance.
How accurate is cost per story point?
As accurate as your cost baseline and capacity model — which you control. The goal is directional consistency: when the same model runs every sprint, trends and comparisons are meaningful even if any single task's cost is an approximation. TheMetrics shows distributions and outliers rather than pretending to false precision.
Can finance use these numbers?
Yes — that is the audience. Cost per feature and milestone roll-ups give finance and leadership a defensible way to discuss engineering investment, capitalization conversations, and roadmap trade-offs, all traceable back to the underlying ClickUp work data.
What do we need to set it up?
Connect ClickUp with read-only OAuth (about 2 minutes), then add your cost baseline and capacity assumptions — real salaries or role bands, your choice. Initial analysis of your workspace history takes around 20 minutes. Cost analytics are available on the Team and Business plans — see pricing — with a 14-day free trial.