The Hidden Costs of Poor Software Quality in Real Life

Whether you’re creating software for your business or building one for people to use, the goal is essentially the same: it should work and do exactly what it’s meant to do. If you’re building a CMS, for example, then it should be able to manage every part of a customer database smoothly and without drama.

Sadly, poor software quality has become the norm these days. According to Cybersecurity Drive, a shocking 80% of developers admit that they sometimes release software with known vulnerabilities, probably in a bid to have a first-mover advantage.

This is wrong on so many fronts and can cost businesses millions, ruin reputations, and even put lives at risk. Let’s pull back the curtains and look at what happens when bad code slips through the cracks and the potential costs in real life.

What Do Software Quality Issues Look Like?

Before we get into the costs, let’s first be clear on what poor software quality is. You may be picturing clunky apps and websites that keep crashing. That’s just a small part of it. Poor software quality can show up in a lot of ways.

Frequent crashes and system failures that interrupt normal operations
Slow performance that makes simple tasks take forever to do
Security vulnerabilities that leave sensitive data open to breaches
Inconsistent behavior, where the exact same action produces different results
User interface that confuses rather than guides
Lack of proper testing before deployment
Incomplete or inadequate documentation that leaves users guessing

And the monetary costs of problems like these? Way bigger than you can imagine.

According to the most recent data from Accenture, these days, a lot of developers race against the clock to push out new software. So, they spend less time than they normally would looking for errors.

The result? Poor quality software and a growing pile of technical debt, which costs the U.S. economy a whopping $2.41 trillion annually. For context, that’s more than the GDP of many countries.

Let’s look at where all this money goes.

The Impact of Poor Software Quality

Now, let’s get to the meat of it. The consequences of poor software quality aren’t abstract. They’re real, measurable, expensive, and downright scary.

Real-Life Accidents

If you think bad software is just about clunky user interfaces and computer glitches, think again. Bad software can cause real-life accidents leading to injury, expensive healthcare costs, and sometimes loss of life.

We’re talking about software that manages power stations, hospitals, cars, and even airplanes. When that software fails, the cost can be life-altering.

Remember the Boeing 737 MAX crashes? While multiple factors were at play, investigators traced part of the problem to software quality issues with the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS).

After the first incident on October 29, 2018, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) directed Boeing to make urgent software updates. Unfortunately, that did not happen fast enough to prevent the subsequent March 10, 2019, crash.

That’s two crashes tied to one piece of software, hundreds of people dead, and roughly $20 billion in costs.

But not all software-related injuries make global headlines. Some happen quietly. A malfunctioning machine software on a factory floor, a faulty car sensor, or a medical device that doesn’t alert when it should.

As Frank Piscitelli, attorney, points out, personal injury cases like this can also be connected to defective products. Those affected may have legal grounds for compensation. Of course, bad software falls under the category of a defective product.

Lost Productivity

Software quality issues don’t just cause spectacular failures that could result in accidents or injuries; on the business end, they eat away at productivity every single day. If you’ve ever sat waiting for a system to load, you know exactly what this one feels like.

Loss of productivity is not selective. 45% of developers say they spend a huge chunk of their time fixing bugs, as a result of AI-generated code, according to a 2025 survey by Stack Overflow. That’s time that could be channeled to actual coding. And with employees wasting more than 36 working days annually on technology frustrations, the situation is not much better for end users.

Multiply that across an organization with just 100 employees, and you’re looking at thousands of hours of productivity lost every year.

Increased Operational Costs

It’s easy to underestimate just how much bad software can eat into your budget. For context, it’s five times more expensive for developers to fix a software quality issue when it’s been deployed for live use.

For end users, uninstalling the offending software and migrating data to a more stable version can be very expensive, both in terms of business lost and payment to IT consultants.

Here’s how the math works:

Maintenance costs skyrocket because your developers spend more time battling bugs instead of adding new features.
Downtime at your client’s end will lead to missed orders, delayed projects, and disgruntled customers.
The customer support team will get overwhelmed with issues that they shouldn’t be dealing with in the first place.

Even infrastructure takes a hit. Poor software quality puts extra strain on the hardware it runs on, forcing servers and systems to work harder than they should.

Security Vulnerabilities

Poor-quality software is often insecure. It typically boasts bloated code, outdated libraries, and rushed development, all of which are the best gifts any cybercriminal can receive.

Every flaw is a potential entry point for a data breach, which comes with its own set of problems.

To give you an idea of this problem in monetary value, the average cost for a data breach globally is currently around $4.4 million, according to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025. Mind you, that’s just the average, which means it can go way above that in certain situations.

That’s not all, though. If the software user handles sensitive data, like credit card numbers, healthcare information (HIPAA), or customer privacy data (GDPR), poor quality software can result in serious legal trouble.

Under GDPR, for instance, companies can be fined up to 4% of their global turnover. That’s enough to put many businesses in dire straits overnight.

Poor User Experience and Churn

At the end of it all, everything leads here: losing customers.

According to a PWC survey, no matter how much they love a brand, 32% of all customers would walk away and stop doing business with them after just one bad experience. In the world of software, a bad experience is directly tied to things like poor quality, slow load times, confusing interfaces, or features that simply don’t work.

And if walking away is not enough, this type of bad experience will affect your brand reputation. Negative reviews spread like wildfire, especially on social media, and very soon, even customers who never had a negative experience will begin to lose trust in your business.

Preventing Bad Software

So, now that we know the cost of poor software, what’s the fix? The good news is that writing quality code is entirely possible and way cheaper than dealing with the consequences of poor software quality. Here’s how:

Invest in Developer Training: It starts with empowering your developers to write better code from the start. Provide continuous training and, as much as possible, give them the tools they need to work. This small investment is worth the cost of hundreds of future data breaches.
Implement Strong Code Review Processes: Next, embrace a strong software quality assurance process. If possible, implement peer code reviews, where one developer will verify what another did to ensure it meets your high standards. This is not about criticism; it’s about collective ownership and catching issues early.
Establish Clear Quality Metrics: You can’t improve what you don’t measure. This is why it’s important to define clear metrics for your software development process. Everyone should know what defect density, mean time to detect (MTTD), mean time to resolve (MTTR), and so on are.
Implement an Agile Methodology: Finally, see if you can adopt agile methodology in your development processes. By working on and delivering small batches of code at a time, it will be easier to catch errors early on.

Final Thoughts

We all know that deadlines are tight and competition is stiff, but releasing buggy software, whether intentionally or not, is bad for business. It costs money, damages reputation, and can even get you fined by industry regulators.

But when you invest in quality software, you’re saving millions of dollars down the line, and showing that your company can be trusted. Ultimately, the choice is yours. You can pay for quality now or pay for the lack of it later. It’s a no-brainer which one is the best option.