They don't though. Bugs have three costs. Immediate corporate costs, corporate restitution costs, and cost-to-fix. Immediate corporate costs are loss of custo

They don't though. Bugs have three costs. Immediate corporate costs, corporate restitution costs, and cost-to-fix. Immediate corporate costs are loss of customers, loss of sales, and loss of goodwill leading to future loss of customers/sales. Restitution costs are costs to repair reputational damage and make good on customer losses. This element can be zero or it can be billions, depending on the exact nature of the loss. Cost-to-fix can be trivial, or it can be months of work. Cost-to-fix is unrelated to corporate costs. There is absolutely no relationship of any kind between the ease with which a bug can be fixed in code/production and the amount of corporate loss it caused. There is a very rough relationship between age and cost-to-fix, but it's very approximate. If code is documented and maintained and there are no forgotten areas written by people who have left, age effects should be minor. If the code is an impenetrable ball of mouldy spaghetti written by people who are long gone without leaving docs, you're screwed.