Estimate what your team is burning on AI review noise.
Your AI code review tool produces a lot of comments. A large fraction of those comments are false positives your engineers dismiss, and you are paying for every one of them twice. Once on the vendor invoice, and again in the attention cost of the senior engineer who had to read the comment before ignoring it. This worksheet measures both numbers.
Seven inputs, four outputs, ten minutes. Every default is based on published industry figures or conservative midpoints. Override any default where you have better data. The result updates live as you type.
Your inputs
Your outputs
How the math works
Output 1: Total pull requests reviewed by AI per year
Formula: engineers × PRs per engineer per week × 50 weeks × AI review coverage percent
Example with defaults and a 50-engineer team: 50 × 4 × 50 × 100% = 10,000 PRs/year
Output 2: Annual false-positive investigations on your current tool
Formula: total PRs per year × current tool FP rate
Example with defaults: 10,000 × 40% = 4,000 false positives per year
Output 3: Current annual cost of false-positive investigations
Formula: false positives per year × minutes per investigation / 60 × loaded hourly rate
Example with defaults: 4,000 × 10 / 60 × $95 = $63,333 per year. For a 200-engineer team, the number scales to roughly $253,000 per year. For a 500-engineer team, roughly $633,000 per year.
Output 4: Projected annual savings from switching to Nocturne
Formula: (current FP rate − Nocturne FP rate) × total PRs × minutes per investigation / 60 × loaded hourly rate
Example with defaults: (40% − 8%) × 10,000 × 10 / 60 × $95 = $50,667 per year saved. This is the number the 30-day pilot would measure directly on your actual pull requests. If the measured number comes out higher, your savings are higher. If it comes out lower, you pay the pilot fee and walk away with data.
Which Nocturne tier fits your team
Nocturne pricing is flat base fee plus performance share. Every tier charges a predictable monthly base, plus 20 percent of the measured monthly savings the service actually delivers. When Nocturne does not save you money, you only pay the base. When Nocturne saves you a lot, both sides win.
| Tier | Flat base fee | Performance share | Team size |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pilot (30 days) | $2,500 one-time | None | Any size |
| Standard | $2,000/month | 20% of measured savings | Up to 50 engineers |
| Growth | $4,500/month | 20% of measured savings | 51 to 200 engineers |
| Enterprise | $9,000/month | 20% of measured savings | 200+ engineers |
Annual prepay: 15% off flat base fee only. The performance share is unchanged.
Decision matrix
| Projected annual savings (Output 4) | Recommended tier | Total annual cost (monthly base) | Net savings to client |
|---|---|---|---|
| Less than $25,000 | Not a fit yet | N/A | Use the open-source version directly, no managed service |
| $25,000 to $100,000 (up to 50 engineers) | Standard ($2,000/month) | $29,000 to $44,000 | Client keeps roughly 0% to 71% of savings |
| $100,000 to $300,000 (51 to 200 engineers) | Growth ($4,500/month) | $74,000 to $114,000 | Client keeps roughly 26% to 62% of savings |
| $300,000 to $1,000,000 (51 to 200 engineers) | Growth ($4,500/month) | $114,000 to $254,000 | Client keeps roughly 62% to 75% of savings |
| $1,000,000 to $3,000,000 (200+ engineers) | Enterprise ($9,000/month) | $308,000 to $708,000 | Client keeps roughly 69% to 76% of savings |
| $3,000,000 and above (200+ engineers) | Enterprise ($9,000/month) | $708,000 and up | Client keeps roughly 76% or more of savings |
Month-1 pilot: Every engagement starts with a 30-day pilot at a flat $2,500 fee. At the end of month 1, you receive a written savings report with the measured false-positive reduction on your actual pull requests. If the measured savings come in below an agreed threshold, you exit at the end of month 1 with no further obligation and you keep the report. If the measured savings clear the threshold, the engagement converts to one of the tiers above.
Reality check
This worksheet is a back-of-the-envelope estimator, not a guaranteed savings figure. The real number comes from the 30-day phase-one pilot, which measures actual false-positive rates on your actual pull requests. The worksheet exists so you can sanity-check whether a pilot is worth your time before scheduling an intro call.
Things the worksheet does not capture (and that the real pilot does)
- The distribution of false positives across your team (sometimes concentrated in a few review-heavy engineers, which changes the economics)
- The quality of true positives (Nocturne might miss some real issues your current tool catches. We measure this and report it.)
- Time-of-day patterns (false positives investigated at the end of a long day cost more in context-switch than the raw minutes suggest)
- Trust-erosion effects (if your team has stopped reading AI review comments entirely, your current tool's "false positive cost" is effectively zero because nobody is paying attention, which is a different problem)
Things the worksheet intentionally excludes
- Soft benefits (morale, reduced interruption, faster pull-request turnaround)
- Competitive benefits (shipping faster than competitors who are drowning in AI noise)
- Strategic benefits (ownership of a tunable local tool vs. dependency on a commercial vendor)
These are real, but quantifying them is unreliable and including them in the pitch is how vendors lose credibility. The worksheet stays on hard dollars only.
How to use this worksheet in a conversation
Fill in your numbers. Save a copy. Bring it to the thirty-minute intro call. The call starts with your worksheet on the screen and we walk through each input together, adjusting where your data differs from the defaults. By the end of the call, we both know whether a pilot is worth running.
If the answer is no, the call ends there and costs you nothing. If the answer is yes, we schedule the pilot kickoff for the following week.
Ready to run the numbers against real PR volume?
Start at nocturnehq.com. We respond to every well-formed inquiry within three business days.