# Cut millions in dev costs with **Mend Renovate Enterprise** Automate dependency updates across your repos to save developer time, strengthen security, and unlock instant ROI. [Estimate your savings](#get-started) [Read the paper](/resources/white-papers/roi-of-automated-dependency-management/) ### See your savings in under a minute Number of Developers How many developers are involved in software development or maintenance. Use the range closest to your team size. 100 500 1000 2000 5000 10000 20000 Avg. Developer Cost Average loaded (salary+benefits) annual developer cost. Default: $150,000. Current Approach How do you currently manage dependency updates? Manual Assumes ~1 hour/week/developer is spent managing dependency updates via PRs, reviews, and fixes. Dependabot / Mend Renovate Community Assumes ~30 minutes/week/developer is spent managing dependency updates via PRs, reviews, and fixes. Mend Renovate Enterprise Assumes fully automated, policy-driven updates. Minimal human intervention (~5 minutes/week/developer, largely for edge cases). #### Annual Savings With Mend Renovate Enterprise Mend Renovate Enterprise can reduce annual developer effort and cost for dependency updates at scale. #### Annual Cost Comparison Calculation Assumptions & Footnotes **Calculation assumptions:** * Working weeks per year: **48** * Hours per work week: **40** * Average developer cost includes salary + benefits * Annual cost = # Developers × (minutes/week ÷ 60) × weeks/year × hourly cost **Time per week, per developer:** * **Manual:** 60 minutes/week — Industry studies and large enterprise observations find that 1 hour/week/developer is reasonable for manual dependency management (including noticing, reviewing, fixing, and merging updates). This may vary, but for large codebases and teams it’s often an underestimation. * **Dependabot / Mend Renovate Community:** 30 minutes/week — Free tools like Dependabot and Mend Renovate Community automate PR creation, but manual triage, approvals, and fixes remain. Based on customer interviews and internal surveys. * **Mend Renovate Enterprise:** 5 minutes/week — Across enterprise Mend Renovate Enterprise deployments, customers report median overhead of less than 5 minutes/week/dev on dependency updates. **Sources:** * Composite of 10+ large enterprise IT organizations, Mend customer interviews, and published DevOps studies. Contact Mend for reference data. ## Why free tools aren’t enough GHAS Dependabot Mend Renovate Community Mend Renovate Enterprise | | GHAS Dependabot | Mend Renovate Community | Mend Renovate Enterprise | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | **Cost** | Free | | | | | --- | --- | | Free | Free | | | | | | --- | --- | | Paid | Paid | | | **Deployment type** | Cloud/Self-hosted | | | | | --- | --- | | Cloud | Self-hosted | | | | | | --- | --- | | Cloud | Self-hosted | | | **Creates PRs for dependency updates** | | | | | | --- | --- | | | | | | | | | --- | --- | | | | | | **Responds to repo activity** | | | | | | --- | --- | | | | | | | | | --- | --- | | | | | | **Merge confidence ratings** | Sparse scoring | | | | | --- | --- | | | | | | | | | --- | --- | | | | | | **APIs (sync,run/list jobs)** | | | | | | --- | --- | | Web UI | | | | | | | --- | --- | | Web UI | | | | **Support** | Limited (license-dependent) | | | | | --- | --- | | | | | | | | | --- | --- | | | | | | **Scales to enterprise demand** | | | | | | --- | --- | | | | | | | | | --- | --- | | | | | | **[Merge confidence workflows](#merge-confidence)** | | | | | | --- | --- | | | | | | | | | --- | --- | | | | | | **Reporting APIs** | | | | | | --- | --- | | | | | | | | | --- | --- | | | | | | **Platforms** | * GitHub Cloud * GitHub Enterprise Server | | | | | --- | --- | | * GitHub.com Cloud * Bitbucket.org Cloud * Azure DevOps Cloud | * GitHub.com Cloud * GitHub Enterprise Server * Bitbucket Data Center * GitLab.com Cloud * GitLab Server | | | | | | --- | --- | | * GitHub.com Cloud * Bitbucket.org Cloud * Azure DevOps Cloud | * GitHub.com Cloud * GitHub Enterprise Server * Bitbucket Data Center * GitLab.com Cloud * GitLab Server | | ### What makes Mend Renovate Enterprise different ### Automated dependency updates Keep your software current by automating updates for both direct and transitive dependencies. Reduce review fatigue, improve patch coverage, and ensure fewer vulnerabilities fall through the cracks. ### Merge Confidence ratings and workflows Prevent dependency updates from breaking your application by knowing the likelihood an update will be successful. Developers can even group, filter, and merge high-confidence dependency updates based on the confidence of an error-free merge. ### Full-scale automation & support Mend Renovate Enterprise provides centralized dashboards, automation policies, and platform-wide coverage across GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and Azure—making it ideal for organizations with hundreds or thousands of repos. ### Integrates with your repos Mend Renovate Enterprise integrates directly into your repositories to support – not overwhelm – your devs as they work on dependency updates. ### FAQs ### Are manual dependency update costs really that high? Yes, and they’re easy to underestimate. Even if each developer spends just 1 hour per week managing updates (tracking new versions, testing changes, resolving CI failures), that adds up to millions in annual developer time for large teams. Research shows code maintenance, including dependency upgrades, consumes up to 30% of developer effort in many organizations. Our ROI model takes a conservative slice of that and still reveals a substantial cost center that most engineering leaders don’t realize they’re paying for. ### Does Dependabot’s partial automation really save 50% of the effort? Roughly, yes. GitHub Dependabot automatically creates PRs for dependency updates, which helps. But it doesn’t solve the hard parts: triaging noisy updates, grouping PRs, testing compatibility, and merging confidently. According to a 2024 peer-reviewed study by Rombaut et al., 67% of Dependabot PRs lacked compatibility scoring, making them hard to trust. This means engineers often review each PR manually – a major drain on productivity that Mend Renovate Enterprise was designed to eliminate. ### Is it realistic to assume Mend Renovate Enterprise will only require 5 minutes/week? Yes, for teams that adopt Mend Renovate’s full feature set. Renovate Enterprise automatically detects, tests, and groups updates with high merge confidence. That enables a “background” update process where most PRs are trusted and auto-merged, requiring minimal developer oversight. Forrester’s TEI report on GitHub found that DevSecOps automation reduced patching time by 75% or more. Mend’s customers report even higher efficiency thanks to grouping logic, dashboards, and merge confidence. In some cases, 90%+ of manual effort is eliminated. ### Isn’t Dependabot free with GitHub? Even teams that think they spend little often overlook the cumulative costs: passive CI failures, stalled PRs, audit scramble, and tech debt from skipped upgrades. Our calculator assumes only 15–60 minutes/week per developer, but when multiplied across hundreds or thousands of engineers, the hidden cost becomes a 7–8 figure annual burden. ### How is Mend Renovate Enterprise different from other tools? Renovate Enterprise combines several capabilities that free tools don’t: * Full transitive dependency updates across ecosystems * Configurable PR grouping * Merge confidence scoring * Org-wide dashboards and automation policies * Support for mixed environments and monorepos * Dedicated enterprise support ### Do you integrate with our CI/CD tools? Yes. Mend Renovate Enterprise integrates with all major systems including GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Azure DevOps, and your existing CI/CD pipelines. It fits into your current workflow and can be customized to match your team’s branching, testing, and release strategies. ### Can I see benchmark data or a customer case study? Yes — our team can walk you through anonymized benchmarks from similar enterprise environments, or connect you with a customer reference. You can also download our full ROI model for deeper validation. ### Get started ### Join leading enterprises using Mend Renovate Enterprise to cut costs and secure their apps. Here’s what you can expect after filling out the form: * An expert on our team will reach out to you * We will schedule a quick discovery call on your use case * We will then schedule a customized demo for you **Thanks for requesting a demo.** An account manager will be in contact shortly.