Pinch technology has proven to be an important and useful tool in the reduction of energy consumption in the chemical industry. However, heat exchanger network (HEN) synthesis may not always be economically possible, since the costs of installing new heat exchange units, pipes and pumps can be extremely high. For this reason, other tools are necessary to try to make the final cost HEN design feasible. In the present work, software was developed to work with the heuristics of pinch analysis and with the concept of the problem table to detect the pinch temperatures. This software defines a HEN for the process for the case of stream splitting and evaluates the economics of this procedure based on maximum energy recovery, compared with the results obtained when streams are not split. This analysis is based on calculation of the minimum heat transfer area and the cost of the equipment, which are compared with the costs involved in hot and cold utilities usage. The impact of the heat transfer coefficient on the final project was also taken into account and a comparison was made between values calculated using the Kern method and those calculated according to the Bell Delaware method for the shell side. Furthermore, loop breaking can provide the engineer with another useful economic tool, since it eliminates excess exchangers and transfers the heat load to another exchanger.