uswds-savings
Design Systems Cost Savings Estimator
This repository contains lightweight Python tools designed to estimate the cost avoidance and Return on Investment (ROI) generated by open source design systems.
It contains two distinct analyses:
- USWDS Federal Impact: A highly accurate estimate of the U.S. Web Design System’s value across live federal domains.
- Civic Design Systems Comparison: A comparative analysis evaluating USWDS against international (GOV.UK) and state-level (NYSDS) peers using open source proxies.
🇺🇸 USWDS Federal Impact Analysis
This analysis focuses exclusively on the value generated by USWDS across the federal government, utilizing highly defensible, first-party telemetry rather than open source proxy metrics.
Methodology
- Base Reproduction Cost: $1,370,828 (Generated via
sccon the core USWDS repository, actively excluding vendor libraries while including all End-to-End automated testing suites). - Federal Reach: 1,095 live executive branch sites. This is based on the latest officially submitted counts, ensuring a defensible baseline (Note: GSA’s automated Site Scanning Analysis routinely counts ~985+ domains, though known scanning limitations mean the true count is likely higher).
- Discount Scenarios: We apply conservative (10%), moderate (50%), and high (80%) discount factors to account for partial adoption.
Visualized ROI
Cost Avoidance Scenarios
Ecosystem ROI Multiplier
Running the Script
To generate the USWDS specific charts and command-line report:
python uswds_federal_savings.py
🌍 Civic Design Systems Comparison
Because live domain telemetry is rarely available for other government systems, this secondary analysis uses open source proxy metrics (GitHub Forks + NPM Dependents) to compare USWDS against the UK Government (GOV.UK) and the New York State Design System (NYSDS).
Configuration Values
Data reflects the current baseline configuration in the comparison script.
| Design System | Base Reproduction Cost | GitHub Forks | NPM Dependents | Total Reuses |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| USWDS | $1,370,828 | 1,100 | 40 | 1,140 |
| GOV.UK | $1,122,301 | 369 | 127 | 496 |
| NYSDS (New York) | $339,456 | 4 | 3 | 7 |
Visualized Comparison
Grouped Savings Comparison
Multi-Framework ROI Multiplier
Running the Script
To generate the comparative charts and command-line report:
python compare_civic_design_systems.py
🚀 Getting Started
Prerequisites
Ensure you have Python 3 installed on your machine. You will also need the matplotlib and numpy libraries for generating the comparative charts.
pip install matplotlib numpy
🛠 Modifying the Data
Both scripts (uswds_federal_savings.py and compare_civic_design_systems.py) are designed to be easily configurable. Open the files and modify the values in the CONFIGURATION blocks at the top. The scripts contain comments with the exact scc commands and source URLs needed to pull fresh, accurate baseline costs.