👩💻
Salaries & Wages: In-house engineers, QA, DevOps, and their managers
🤝
Independent Contractors / Vendors: Third-party developers, freelancers, engineering firms
💼
Employee Benefits: Payroll taxes, health insurance, retirement contributions, bonuses
☁️
Cloud Computing Costs: AWS, Azure, GCP charges for dev/test, CI/CD pipelines
🖥️
Equipment & Supplies: Servers, hardware, licenses (GitHub, Jira, IDEs)
🏢
Rent & Overhead Allocations: Pro-rata share of rent, utilities, and internet for R&D staff
🧪
Prototypes & Testing: Costs of MVPs, staging environments, prototype software
📑
Technical Feasibility Studies: Time/cost to assess the feasibility of new products/features
🛠️
Design, Architecture & Coding: UI/UX engineering, backend/frontend, databases
🐞
Quality Assurance (QA) & Debugging: Automated/manual testing, bug fixes pre-release
⚙️
DevOps / Deployment Engineering: Configuration, automation, containerization tools
⚠️ Important Notes:
🛠️ Maintenance, customer support, and post-release bug fixes are not Section 174 costs and may be expensed normally.
📣 Marketing, sales, and general administrative activities do not qualify.
📥 Download the spreadsheet, complete it, and include it in this questionnaire.