Health

How hours are estimated

Hours to sell, a pitch band, not the exact internal hours you’ll book.

Sell hours vs internal hours: the ranges are sized for client offers and PM planning. Delivery may take more or less once the work is scoped; treat them as a pitch band, not a timesheet forecast.

Where the formulas come from

They are agency heuristics built into Health, not vendor guides or industry tables. Statamic was calibrated first to typical Verve major-upgrade pitches (about €2.5k – €3.5k for a 3.x → current jump at the default rate). Other products follow the same shape: a fixed floor plus hours per major version crossed, heavier for CMS/framework work and lighter for runtime-only (PHP, Node). Majors then get a portfolio weight: Auto stays in a tight scan band (about 0.95–1.15×), or turn Auto off and type any manual factor from 0.25 to 3. That weight uses live scan data or your choice, not past invoices. Use ranges as a sellable starting point; Effort and Buffer adjust for project messiness. Real quotes still need a human look.

Major or patch?Security support ended (EOL) → major upgrade to the current cycle. Still supported (or EOL soon) but behind on the same cycle → patch only. No sellable action → no hours.
Which products count?Only sellable stacks: Statamic, Laravel, PHP, Node, Drupal, Symfony, Python, Ruby, Go, .NET. Nginx, Redis, and similar stay on Runtime but never add hours.
Major = package of linesAlways: Audit 2 – 3 hr + product upgrade (by gap) + Regression QA + deploy 2 – 3 hr. CMS (Statamic / Drupal) also adds Companion Laravel / PHP / hosting 2 – 4 hr and drops separate Laravel/PHP majors so they are not double-counted. Optional Uncertainty buffer 2 – 4 hr (Settings).
Product hours use the major gapGap = whole major numbers between detected version and current cycle (Statamic 3 → 5 → gap 2). Formulas below are Standard effort, before Lean / Heavy.
Patch = small fixed bandStatamic / Laravel / Drupal: 1 – 3 hr. PHP / Node: 0.5 – 1.5 hr. Other sellable: 1 – 2 hr. No audit / QA / buffer package.
Effort, then portfolio, then eurosLean 0.8× · Standard 1× · Heavy 1.25× multiplies every hour line. Majors then apply portfolio weight: Auto from the org scan, or a manual factor from 0.25 to 3 (Settings / Weight). Euros = scaled sell hours × the €/hr rate in this browser.

Major product formulas (Standard)

Min … max sell hours for the product line only (before audit, companion, QA, buffer).

Statamic6 + gap×4 … 10 + gap×5

Laravel6 + gap×4 … 8 + gap×6

Drupal12 + gap×8 … 16 + gap×12

Symfony6 + gap×4 … 10 + gap×5

PHP2 + min(gap,2)×2 … 3 + min(gap,2)×3

Node2 + min(gap,3) … 4 + min(gap,3)×2

Other sellable4 + gap×2 … 6 + gap×4

Example · Statamic 3 → 5 (gap 2), Standard, buffer on

Audit2 – 3

Statamic (6+8 … 10+10)14 – 20

Companion Laravel / PHP / hosting2 – 4

Regression QA + deploy2 – 3

Uncertainty buffer2 – 4

Total22 – 34

At €140/hr that is roughly €3.1k – €4.8k (rounded to €50) to sell. Lean shrinks the total; Heavy grows it. Internal delivery hours may differ.