What does a hire really cost?
The salary is only the part you see. Add benefits, tools, recruiting, ramp, and management and the real number climbs. Pick a role to see what hiring it actually costs — and what installing an AI agent to do the work could replace.
Installed AI — a lab builds and runs it for you in 4–8 weeks— a scoped engagement, typically a fraction of one loaded year, live in 4–8 weeks and running 24/7 with no ramp or turnover. Book the audit for your number.
The figures are yours to edit — nothing is stored. Your free 30-minute audit returns a real, scoped quote to compare.
See the full AI engineer comparison →Salary is the visible part
A headline salary undersells what a role costs. These are the parts that rarely make it into the budget line.
Benefits, taxes, tools, and management
Health benefits, payroll taxes, equipment, software, and the time of whoever manages the role typically add 25–50% on top of base pay — every year.
Recruiting and onboarding
Finding, hiring, and ramping a person costs real money and weeks of reduced output before they are fully productive.
Turnover
When someone leaves, you pay to recruit and ramp all over again — and the knowledge walks out with them. This calculator does not even count it, so the true number is higher.
The hours in a day
One hire covers business hours, minus PTO. Round-the-clock coverage means more headcount; an installed agent runs 24/7 without it.
Hire, build it, or install it
A hire gives you a person and their judgment. A DIY tool gives you something to wire up and maintain. Installed AI is a third option: Bardo builds and runs a production agent for the repetitive, high-volume part of the work — so a hire’s time goes to what actually needs a human.
Compare hire vs build vs install →The starting figures are typical US market ranges from public cost-to-hire and salary sources — illustrative anchors you should edit to your own reality, not benchmarks we assert. Every result is computed from the numbers you enter.