TCO(3 yr) = 3 × (Build + Deploy + Content ops + Infra & ops + QA). Assumes the site is already implemented on each platform: this models what it costs to keep it running and extend it. Adjust the inputs to model your own program. License cost is excluded since both options sit under the same AEM Sites license.

Web dev day rate?The blended daily cost of a standard web developer, whether contractor rate or fully loaded employee cost. This multiplies nearly every labor line in the model, so it scales both platforms' totals up or down together.$1344

AEM specialist premium?The extra rate commanded by AEM-certified full-stack developers (Sling, OSGi, HTL) over general web developers, driven by scarcity. Applied only to the AEM side, so raising it increases every AEM labor cost while leaving EDS untouched.20%

Components built / year?How many new components (AEM) or blocks (EDS) your program builds annually. Drives the recurring build cost on both sides, and QA cost with it since QA is modeled as a percentage of build effort. The per-unit effort sliders below determine how differently this number lands on each platform.30

Deployments / year?Production releases plus hotfixes per year. Each is multiplied by pipeline duration (75 min AEM vs 3 min EDS) and two blocked developers to estimate waiting cost. Because the pipeline times differ so much, raising this widens the gap almost entirely on the AEM side.100

Content tickets / month?Small content-driven dev requests like adding a dialog field or a component variation. Modeled at 0.5 dev-days each on AEM versus 0.3 on EDS, where document-based authoring lets content teams largely self-serve. High-velocity content organizations should push this up.40

Ops FTE cost (loaded)?Fully loaded annual cost (salary, benefits, overhead) of an operations engineer. Multiplied by each platform's ops allocation: 0.30 FTE for AEM (dispatcher tuning, CDN config, publish-tier care) versus 0.10 for EDS, where Adobe operates delivery.$180k

AEM effort / component?Average dev-days to build one AEM component end to end: dialog, Sling Model, HTL template, and testing. Multiplies the components-per-year input into the AEM build cost, so it's one of the most sensitive inputs in the model.3 d

EDS effort / block?Average dev-days to build one EDS block using plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, with no dialogs or backend plumbing. Multiplies the components-per-year input into the EDS build cost. The ratio between this and the AEM effort slider is the core of the development argument.1 d

Fixed assumptions: 75 min vs 3 min per deploy with 2 developers blocked, 0.5 vs 0.3 dev-days per content ticket, 0.30 vs 0.10 ops FTE, QA at 30% vs 15% of build effort. Initial implementation and migration costs are excluded by design: this compares the ongoing cost of running and extending an existing site. Revenue upside from performance (conversion, ranking) is deliberately excluded and only widens the gap.

3-year ongoing TCO: EDS + DA vs. AEM as a Cloud Service