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Agency Scope Architect & Sitemap Estimator
How does the scope architect compute overall development hours, costs, and discipline allocations from route complexity and features?
The estimator models client deliverables by treating each sitemap route as an additive budget of hours. Each route starts with a baseline effort determined by its complexity tier (12 hours for low, 20 hours for medium, and 32 hours for high), then accumulates predetermined hour increments for each enabled feature module. Total project hours are multiplied by the user-defined hourly rate to determine budget, while effort is partitioned across disciplines using fixed percentage coefficients: 18.75% for UX/wireframing, 50% for frontend engineering, 18.75% for backend integration, and the remainder for QA.
The hour allotments and percentage distributions are hardcoded client-side heuristics, not empirical estimates derived from historical agency retrospectives or team velocity data. The model assumes independent, purely additive feature implementation costs and does not account for architectural dependencies, third-party API hurdles, design revisions, non-linear coordination overhead, or blended multi-tier billing rates.
Try a worked example
By default, the four routes total 128 hours. When you click '+ Add Route', the workspace appends a new medium-complexity route (20 base hours) with a Hero Header (+4 hours), increasing project hours by 24 to 152 total hours. At the default $95/hr rate, Estimated Budget Total increases from $12,160 to $14,440 (152 × $95). The discipline breakdown automatically recalculates: Frontend Engineering rises from 64 hrs to 76 hrs (50% of 152), UX and Backend each scale to 29 hrs (Math.round(152 × 0.1875)), and QA adjusts to the balance of 18 hrs.
Route Hours & Complexity Formula
Every route in the Cytoscape sitemap possesses a complexity tier mapped to fixed base hours: 12 hours for low, 20 hours for medium, and 32 hours for high. When specific modules are toggled in the feature matrix, discrete hour tags from the feature catalog (such as 4 hours for testimonials, 8 hours for dynamic pricing, or 16 hours for authentication) are added directly to that route's base hours without interaction terms.
Budget Calculation & Role Allocation
Total estimated cost is calculated directly as the sum of all route hours multiplied by the numeric value in the hourly rate picker. The application then distributes this aggregate effort into four functional silos: 18.75% for Wireframing & UX, 50% for Frontend Engineering, 18.75% for Backend & API Integration, and the arithmetic remainder assigned to QA, Testing & Deployment.
A scope estimate adds assigned route and feature hours
Read the explanation
The saved scope architect assigns twelve, twenty or thirty two base hours for low, medium and high route complexity, then adds feature hours. The home route has twenty base plus four for hero, four for testimonials and eight for pricing, totaling thirty six. Pricing has thirty two base plus sixteen checkout and sixteen calculator, totaling sixty four. Dashboard has thirty two plus sixteen authentication, twelve charts and ten table, totaling seventy. At three pixels per route hour, those bars measure one hundred eight, one hundred ninety two and two hundred ten. These are authored effort assumptions rather than observed engineering time. Contact has twelve base plus six validation and six webhook hours, totaling twenty four. Together the four routes require one hundred ninety four assigned hours. At ninety five currency units per hour the estimate becomes eighteen thousand four hundred thirty. Doubling the hourly rate doubles cost while leaving the assigned effort unchanged. At one pixel per hour the first three route contributions measure thirty six, sixty four and seventy. Route type does not enter this hours calculation; complexity and feature keys do. A chosen technology stack appears as a fixed list rather than automatically measured implementation requirements. The breakdown rounds eighteen point seven five percent of total effort into UX and backend separately, and fifty percent into frontend. For one hundred ninety four hours the allocation is thirty six UX, ninety seven frontend, thirty six backend and a twenty five hour QA remainder. At three pixels per assigned hour the first three bars measure one hundred eight, two hundred ninety one and one hundred eight. These allocations conserve the total because QA is the remainder. In this offline environment Cytoscape initialization runs before feature rendering and event binding and cannot load its external library, so the original controls and export remain uninitialized. The narrated arithmetic explains stored source assumptions without claiming a working proposal export or validated market quote.