In the software world, release speed can be a double-edged sword. Push code out too fast and you risk bugs that tank customer trust. Move too slowly and your competitors eat your lunch. The pressure is particularly brutal for teams building mobile apps, where the sheer variety of devices, operating systems, and network conditions makes testing a never-ending game of catch-up.

It’s not unusual for companies to keep entire closets full of test phones — sometimes dozens of models, each with different quirks — just to keep pace. But as those setups age, they start to creak: devices break, operating systems update, and coverage gaps appear. Test runs slow to a crawl, and the “move fast” part of the equation collapses under the weight of the “don’t break things” part.

That tension has created a growing market for cloud-based testing platforms that can take on the grunt work. Instead of housing and maintaining their own labs, companies rent real devices on demand, run automated test suites, and ship releases with a clearer picture of what’s going to work in the wild.

And now, there’s fresh data on whether that model actually pays off.

In mid-2023, Sauce Labs commissioned a Total Economic Impact study by Forrester Consulting to quantify the return on investment resulting from its mobile application testing solutions. The study found that organizations using Sauce Labs achieved an estimated 217% ROI and recouped their investment in under six months. For a modeled three-year period, it projected a net present value of $6.85 million, driven by factors such as 90% faster test execution, $4.1 million in developer and QA time savings, and $3.5 million in reduced business exposure to app issues.

The Forrester team built its numbers from interviews with enterprise Sauce Labs users — companies large enough that a few seconds shaved off each test run add up to thousands of hours over a year. Those speed gains aren’t just about convenience; they make it possible to catch and fix problems earlier, when the cost to repair them is a fraction of what it would be post-release.

For organizations whose products live or die by user experience, the message is blunt: testing bottlenecks are expensive, and the bill doesn’t just show up in the QA budget — it shows up in churn rates, star ratings, and missed revenue.

Whether companies will actually act on that message is another question. Old habits die hard, and plenty of teams still cling to the “lab in the closet” approach. But if the math in Forrester’s study holds, the economic case for shaking off those habits is getting harder to ignore.

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