A maintenance spreadsheet feels free, but it carries real hidden costs in admin time, missed PMs, emergency parts, and audit prep. Enter your numbers to see the yearly total — and the ROI of switching to purpose-built software.
Hidden annual cost of your spreadsheet
$30,100 / year
$29,512
That's a 51× return on the software cost — and on the Free plan (up to 25 users) you keep the full $30,100.
No per-user fees · Setup in an afternoon · See the full cost breakdown
This calculator totals four hidden costs. Admin time is the hours each week someone spends updating schedules, chasing techs, and building reports, valued at a fully-loaded labor rate. Preventable breakdowns are failures a timely PM would have caught, priced across parts, emergency service, lost production, and overtime. Emergency parts markup is the premium paid when parts are ordered under pressure. And audit prep covers the time and findings that come with reconstructing records from a spreadsheet.
For the full breakdown of these numbers and where they come from, see CMMS vs. Spreadsheet: the real cost of “free” maintenance tracking.
The spreadsheet license is free, but the work around it is not. Admin time spent updating and chasing the sheet, breakdowns that slip through because nothing sends a reminder, premium prices on emergency parts, and audit scrambling typically add up to far more per year than a purpose-built CMMS costs.
Total your current hidden costs — admin hours times your loaded labor rate, plus preventable breakdown costs, emergency parts markup, and audit prep — then subtract the annual cost of the software. The remainder is your net annual savings, and dividing the hidden cost by the software cost gives the ROI multiple.
RunTight is free for up to 25 users — the full CMMS, no credit card. Pro adds advanced analytics and the REST API for $49/month flat ($588/year) with up to 50 users, and every new account includes a 14-day Pro preview — when it ends you stay free automatically.
Related: Downtime Cost Calculator · RunTight pricing