If technology can provide an “out of the box” solution for the general case, maybe needing to estimate at all will become a thing of the past. We can see parallels to this via services like Amazon EC2; traditionally, you’d estimate how much server hardware you needed just to get up an running. Now, you write your software and pay as you go.

The challenge often is to know what the “true cost” is going to be (i.e. what the interest rate is). Startup founders often gross underestimate and overestimate this cost (based on their prior experiences, or lack thereof).