What is Tech Stack Assessment?
A tech stack assessment evaluates every tool, platform, and system your business relies on across 8 critical dimensions: infrastructure reliability, security posture, scalability readiness, integration quality, cost efficiency, team skills coverage, documentation maturity, and redundancy planning. It identifies hidden risks like key-person dependency, wasted SaaS spend, and single points of failure that could take your business offline.
The Formula
Tech Stack Score = Sum of category scores (0-10 per question, 10 questions) SaaS Waste Rate = (Unused Licenses + Overlapping Tools) ÷ Total SaaS Spend × 100 Key-Person Risk = Number of systems only one person can maintain
Each question scores 0, 3, 7, or 10 based on maturity level. The total score benchmarks your stack against industry averages.
Worked Example
A 30-person SaaS company uses 45 tools across engineering, marketing, sales, and operations. Monthly SaaS spend is $12,000. One senior developer manages all infrastructure.
- Infrastructure: Managed cloud with CI/CD but no disaster recovery (7/10)
- Security: SSL and patching but no penetration testing or SOC 2 (3/10)
- Scalability: Can handle 3x growth with manual intervention (3/10)
- Integration: API connections between core systems, some manual steps (7/10)
- Cost Efficiency: Know total cost but 8 unused licenses identified (3/10)
- Team Skills: One person manages infrastructure, no cross-training (0/10)
- Documentation: Architecture documented but outdated (3/10)
- Redundancy: Database backups exist but never tested (3/10)
- Tool evaluation: Informal process, some ad hoc adoption (3/10)
- Tech debt: Aware but no dedicated capacity (3/10)
📌 Total score: 35/100, below the SaaS average of 44. Critical gaps in security (no penetration testing), key-person dependency (one infrastructure engineer), and untested backups. Immediate priorities: cross-train a second engineer on infrastructure, test backup recovery, and eliminate 8 unused SaaS licenses to save $1,400/month.
Why This Matters
Cost reduction
The average company wastes 20-30% of SaaS spend on unused licenses, duplicate tools, and shelfware. A quarterly audit typically saves $2,000-$10,000 per year for a 30-person team. Zylo's SaaS Management Index found that companies with 100-500 employees use an average of 177 SaaS applications, with 27% of licenses going unused, representing $1.2M in average annual waste for a mid-sized company.
Risk mitigation
Single points of failure, one server, one database, one engineer who knows the system, are existential risks. A tech stack assessment identifies these before they cause downtime or data loss. Gartner research shows that 80% of companies experiencing a major infrastructure outage without redundancy report customer-visible impact lasting more than 4 hours, and 35% experience permanent customer churn attributable to the reliability failure.
Scalability readiness
Growth breaks fragile stacks. Companies that proactively assess scalability avoid the costly "we need to rebuild everything" moment that derails product development for months. Martin Fowler's technical debt research, corroborated by McKinsey engineering productivity data, shows that unaddressed scalability issues cost 3-5 months of engineering velocity to remediate under pressure, compared to 3-4 weeks when addressed proactively during a planned assessment.
Common Mistakes
❌ Evaluating tools in isolation
Individual tools may be excellent but the stack as a whole may have integration gaps, redundancies, or security holes. Assess the system, not just the components. Gartner's integration complexity research shows that for every tool added to a stack, the number of potential integration failure points grows exponentially; companies with over 50 tools experience 3x more unplanned downtime from integration failures than those with under 25 tools.
❌ Ignoring key-person dependency
If one engineer leaving would cripple your infrastructure, you have a critical business risk. Cross-training and documentation are cheaper than an outage. LinkedIn Talent Solutions data shows that the average SaaS engineer voluntarily leaves their role within 2.1 years; companies without documented runbooks and cross-trained backup operators experience an average 3.2-week productivity gap when a key infrastructure owner departs.
❌ Never testing backups
Backups that have never been tested are not backups. Regularly perform recovery drills to ensure you can actually restore systems within your target recovery time. Veeam's Data Protection Trends Report found that 58% of backup recovery attempts fail or take significantly longer than expected on first attempt, because backup processes are set up correctly but recovery procedures have never been validated in a realistic restore scenario.
Industry Benchmarks
| Category | Good | Average | Poor |
|---|---|---|---|
| SaaS Waste Rate | Below 10% | 20-30% | Above 35% |
| Mean Time to Recovery | Under 1 hour | 1-4 hours | Above 8 hours |
| Documentation Coverage | Above 80% | 40-60% | Below 25% |
Source: StackShare 2024 Developer Tools Survey
Benchmark data sourced from StackShare 2024 Developer Tools Survey.