Where your platform budget actually goes (and why that matters more than your license fee)

The maintenance trap

The annual license fee is the number that appears on the invoice. It is a fraction of the actual cost of running the system. The real expense lives in operational overhead: developer hours spent on workarounds for platform limitations, release cycles that take weeks because any change risks cascading through the entire monolithic system, QA efforts that scale with the blast radius of every update rather than the scope of the change itself.

This operational drag is compounding. Every year on a legacy platform adds another layer of technical debt, another set of integration workarounds, another reason the next upgrade is more expensive than the last. Research from Coherent Solutions and broader industry analysis suggests that the hidden costs of running modern tools inside legacy architecture, including security layers, data normalisation, governance retrofits, and integration workarounds, can inflate total cost of ownership by 200% to 400% compared to original vendor quotes.

For organisations on Sitecore specifically, the economics have shifted further. Sitecore XP/XM 9.3 reached official end-of-support on 31 December 2025. Migrating to Sitecore's own XM Cloud requires a complete rebuild: no migration tool exists, the frontend must be rebuilt in Next.js, and all controller logic must be re-architected. This means the effort to stay with Sitecore is comparable to the effort of moving to an alternative, which fundamentally changes the cost calculation that has kept many organisations in place.

The work you are not doing

The cost of maintenance is not only the money you spend on it. It is also the money you do not spend on anything else. Every week a team patches rather than builds is a week it is not improving user experience, testing new conversion paths, or optimising the content delivery pipeline that directly affects revenue.

This shows up in measurable ways: slower time-to-market, fewer experiments per quarter, a growing gap between what marketing wants to launch and what the platform can support. And it shows up in less measurable but equally real ways: the gradual erosion of internal trust in the digital function, the sense that the platform team is always maintaining rather than enabling, the difficulty of making a business case for the next round of investment when the last round did not deliver the outcomes it promised.

The governance question underneath the cost question

Most replatforming conversations start with "what does it cost to switch?" because that is the visible risk. But there is a deeper risk that the cost question often masks. Many organisations have already been through a migration that did not solve the problem. The platform changed. The structural issues did not. Publication still runs through development. Content is still unstructured. Governance is still ad hoc. The scar tissue from that experience makes the next decision harder, not because migration is inherently risky, but because the last one was scoped as a technology swap rather than an architectural and governance overhaul.

When replatforming is treated as a technology project, it fails in a predictable way: the new system inherits the old system's problems because nobody redesigned the content model, the editorial workflow, or the governance framework. The platform gets modern. The way people use it does not. And two years later, the same frustration returns.

The organisations that get this right treat the migration as an architecture and governance project with a technology component, not the other way around. The content model is redesigned for structured, reusable, API-accessible content. The editorial workflow matches how the team actually works. Governance is built into the system rather than managed around it. The technology choice matters, but it is not the thing that determines whether the migration succeeds.

The question underneath the question

For organisations where 70% or more of the budget goes to maintenance, "what does it cost to switch?" is the wrong starting point. The right question is: what is it costing you to stay? Not just in euros, but in the strategic work that never gets done, the capability that never gets built, and the competitive ground that gets ceded one quarter at a time because the platform cannot keep up with what the organisation needs to do.

Sources: Gartner (via SIG Finance Signals 2025): 70% of IT budgets to maintenance. Rimini Street: up to 89% to keeping the lights on. Storyblok State of CMS 2025 (n=1,300): ~€420,000 avg martech spend, 93% say CMS failing. Coherent Solutions / industry analysis: TCO inflation of 200-400% vs. vendor quotes.