Evidence Report · Software Valuation
Privacy-first encrypted email platform — full webmail, external account sync (Gmail / IMAP / Outlook), native calendar & booking, zero-knowledge E2EE messaging, AI triage & voice intelligence, Ad Studio, and LemonSqueezy billing. Deployed live at curomail.com.
The Defensible Quartet
Traditional Build Cost
Low: $2,089,125 · Mid: $3,683,250 · High: $5,278,500
What a normal web-software shop charges to plan, architect, and build a product of this scope.
Engineering Effort
Mid estimate, two independent models in agreement (productivity model + COCOMO II post-architecture). Represents the human capital compressed into a ~5-week sprint.
Team & Schedule Replaced
18 engineers working for ~19 months — the conventional staffing to produce this output on a normal delivery schedule.
Build Speed
Shipped in ~5 calendar weeks vs the 18.6-month conventional schedule. No corners cut — 49 regression tests, 717 test runs, 218 defects tracked.
The Real Number
27.3 engineering-years delivered under 1 operator — the sustained ~18-person team you'd otherwise staff, run by one person supervising Steve. ~17× faster than the conventional 18.6-month schedule.
Traditional cost avoided: $2.1M – $5.3M (supporting figure — the headline is the leverage, not the dollar).
The Hard Evidence — no estimates, counts straight from git and the codebase
| Code (LOC, non-blank, non-comment) | 100,751 |
|---|---|
| ↳ Python | 71,806 |
| ↳ HTML | 22,755 |
| ↳ JavaScript | 28,945 |
| ↳ CSS | 5,019 |
| ↳ JSON / config | 5,161 |
| ↳ Docs / specs | 2,681 |
| Files | 541 |
| Git commits | 552 |
| Distinct edit-days | 27 |
| Lines inserted / deleted | 122,658 ins / 19,036 del |
| Real calendar span | 2026-06-14 → 2026-07-18 (5 weeks) |
| Contributors | 1 |
| Defects tracked / resolved | 218 tracked / 145 resolved (67%) |
| Regression tests | 49 tests |
| Test runs (total) | 717 |
What's Actually in It — feature enumeration from the source
Multi-tenant AI chief-of-staff for email — triages every inbox message, surfaces only what needs the user, drafts replies in the user's own learned voice, layered with a security / relationship / commitment intelligence stack. FastAPI + SQLAlchemy 2.0 · 65 model classes · ~90 internal routes · 83 test files · 44 SEO landing pages. Pre-launch, targets curomail.com.
classify_email() scores 1(critical)–10(ignore), assigns category, drafts reply when warranted (ported from AK's proven single-tenant categorizer — "the moat")How We Costed It — methodology
Model. The same model with the same constants is applied to every project in this portfolio — there are no per-project complexity multipliers and no schedule compression applied. The generator is console/backend/tools/evidence_merge.py.
Low bound. Productivity model — 100,751 lines of production code ÷ 25 finished LOC per developer-day ÷ 21.7 work-days per month = 185.7 person-months (15.5 person-years). The 25 LOC/day figure is the conservative industry baseline for finished, tested, reviewed code (McConnell, Code Complete); it excludes generated scaffolding and build artifacts.
High bound. COCOMO II post-architecture — PM = 2.94 × (100.75 KLOC)1.0997 = 469.2 person-months (39.1 person-years). Applied nominally, with no effort-adjustment multipliers, so the ceiling is not inflated.
Mid (reported). The arithmetic mean of the two models: 327.4 person-months = 27.3 person-years. This is the figure quoted throughout this report.
Rate assumption. $135,000/year fully-loaded blended developer (salary, benefits, overhead) = $11,250 per person-month. Applied uniformly to all three effort bounds: low $2.09M, mid $3.68M, high $5.28M.
Calendar. Git-verified: 2026-06-14 → 2026-07-18 = 1.1 months of real calendar. COCOMO's schedule equation gives the calendar a conventional team would need: TDEV = 3.67 × 327.40.28 = 18.6 months at a sustainable 17.6 engineers. Speed advantage = 18.6 ÷ 1.1 = 17.0×.