Your assumptions, made arithmetic
Put in your headcount, realistic participation, your own absence figures and the effect you believe in, including zero. The calculator adds no effect size of its own, so every number it returns comes from yours.
Your model, over 3 years
Programme cost
$48,799
Modelled saving
$70,560
On your assumptions this nets $21,761 over 3 years, paying back the build in about 7 months.
- Active participants
- 175
- Absence days avoided per year
- 84
- MVP build
- $12,000
- Maintenance, 3 years
- $36,000
- Cost per participant per year
- $93
Every figure above comes from your assumptions. Model it low before you present it high.
What decides the outcome
Participation, not the feature list
Every saving depends on participation
The model multiplies every projected saving by participation. A great effect size at 12% sustained engagement still returns something. A great platform at 3% engagement is a cost with almost no return.
Sign-ups are not participation
Launch enrolment flatters a programme. Model sustained monthly active use six months in, which is usually a fraction of the launch figure.
Employees are wary of health data at work
A quick way to kill participation is to make people feel their employer is watching their health. Aggregate-only reporting keeps people taking part, and it keeps you compliant too.
You need the reporting to defend the budget
Whoever signs this off will be asked to justify it next year. Aggregate participation and outcome reporting from $799 gives them figures to point to.
Methodology
Why there are no benchmarks in here
The arithmetic is simple and entirely yours: headcount times participation gives active participants; participants times your absence days times the reduction you selected gives days avoided; days avoided times your fully-loaded day cost gives the annual saving. Cost is the published build floor plus any add-on plus maintenance at $1,000/mo across the window.
The calculator has no default effect size and no per-employee saving benchmark. The return multiples that circulate in this category trace back to studies whose methodology has been widely challenged, and more rigorous later work has generally found much smaller effects. A default would become the number everyone reported.
The tool also models only absence, not healthcare claims cost, retention or presenteeism. Those costs exist but are harder to attribute, and adding them would make the output look more authoritative while making it less defensible.
Run this at a participation rate you would bet your own money on, not the one in the vendor deck, with a zero effect size as the floor. If it only works at 60% participation and a double-digit reduction, it does not work, and a slider is a far cheaper way to learn that than a year on a deployed platform.
FAQ
Corporate wellness ROI questions
What is the ROI of a corporate wellness programme?
The evidence is contested, which is why this calculator asks for your own effect size instead of supplying one; the methodology section above explains the research problem. Run the model at a pessimistic assumption as well as an optimistic one. Built on your own participation and absence figures, it will hold up better in a budget meeting than a borrowed multiple.
Why doesn't the calculator include a benchmark saving per employee?
Effect sizes vary enormously by programme type, population, baseline health and how participation is measured, so no single benchmark would fit your programme. Set the reduction slider to zero instead. That shows the programme's pure cost, a figure business cases rarely state.
What does a corporate wellness app cost to build?
From our published prices: an MVP build from $12,000, a full custom platform from $25,000 for multi-employer reporting, SSO and benefits integrations, dashboards from $799, and maintenance from $1,000/mo. A five-day planning sprint at $1,500 comes first and is credited toward the build.
What drives participation?
A programme nobody opens has an effect size of zero, whatever the literature says. What moves participation is unglamorous: enrolment that takes under a minute, manager-level visibility, something that happens in the first week instead of a portal waiting to be visited, and not asking employees to hand over health data they are uncomfortable sharing with an employer.
Does employee health data in a wellness app create compliance obligations?
It can, and the answer depends on how the programme is structured and who holds the data. An employer-sponsored programme that touches health information sits close to several regimes at once, and the boundary is a question for counsel rather than a developer. What we do is map which regime applies during planning, and design so that the employer sees aggregate reporting rather than identifiable individual health data by default.
Next steps
From model to programme
Work with us
Send us the model and we'll pressure-test it
Paste in your participation assumption and what this returned. If the programme only works at numbers we don't believe you'll hit, we'll say so before you build anything.