What Is Your Legacy System Actually Costing You?
Most companies know their legacy system has problems. What they don't know is how much those problems are quietly costing them every year — beyond the license fees and maintenance contracts that show up in the budget.
Most companies know their legacy system has problems.
What they don't know is how much those problems are quietly costing them every year — beyond the license fees and maintenance contracts that show up in the budget.
The real cost lives in the hours your team spends on manual workarounds because the system can't do what the business needs it to do. It lives in the integrations that break when anything upstream changes. It lives in the institutional knowledge trapped inside one or two people who are the only ones who understand how the system actually works. And it lives in the decisions that get delayed because reporting takes days instead of minutes.
These aren't hypothetical risks. They're compounding operational costs that grow every quarter you delay action.
We built this calculator to help you put rough numbers to what you're probably already feeling.
Answer seven questions about your system's age, usage, dependencies, and failure patterns, and you'll get:
An annual hidden cost estimate based on common cost multipliers for systems with your profile
A risk exposure score that accounts for integration fragility, staff dependency, and outage frequency
A modernization urgency tier so you can see where your system falls: manageable, approaching critical, or already overdue
A "likely failure mode" narrative describing the most probable way your system will create a serious business disruption, based on the pattern your inputs reveal
This isn't a sales pitch disguised as a tool. There's no email gate. You'll see your results immediately, and you can use them however you need — whether that's building a business case internally, comparing modernization vendors, or simply confirming what your team has been telling leadership for months.
Why Hidden Costs Are the Ones That Matter
Visible Line Items in Your IT budget
Licensing, hosting, contracted support — are rarely what make legacy systems expensive. The real financial weight comes from indirect costs that don't appear in any single budget line but compound across the organization over time.
Manual Workarounds are a Good Example
When a system can't support a new business requirement, teams fill the gap with spreadsheets, email chains, and manual data transfers. Each one seems small. But across dozens of users over the course of a year, they represent thousands of hours of low-value work and significantly higher error rates.
Staff Dependency is Another
When only one or two people understand how a system works, your organization carries a risk that no insurance policy covers. If that person leaves, retires, or is simply unavailable during a critical moment, the business impact can be severe and immediate.
Then There's the Opportunity Cost
The projects that never get started, the integrations that can't be built, and the data-driven decisions that can't be made because the system simply isn't capable. These are the costs that don't show up until you look at what your competitors are doing that you can't.
Ready to See What Modernization Would Look Like?
If your results confirmed what you suspected — or revealed costs you hadn't considered — the next step is understanding your options. Moonello helps growing companies modernize legacy systems with an approach that prioritizes business continuity, long-term ownership, and practical execution over theoretical roadmaps.