Every year on legacy has a price — maintenance drag, technical debt, the talent cliff, end-of-life fees, breach exposure. It compounds. Put in your numbers and see what staying put costs over the next five years.
The gap widens every year you wait — debt compounds, the talent pool shrinks, and EOL fees double.
A range, not a quote — this is the cost of staying, modeled from your inputs and published research. It is not ModernLift's pricing. Only the EOL fee schedule (Microsoft) and the breach/debt ratios are hard-sourced; the ~ escalation rates are illustrative assumptions. Figures as of June 2026.
The model projects six cost drivers forward from your inputs, compounding each year. The hard numbers are sourced — Microsoft's published end-of-life fee schedule, IBM's breach-cost data, McKinsey's and Stripe's technical-debt ratios, Deloitte's run-the-business share. The year-over-year escalation rates are illustrative assumptions, labelled as such, and the output is deliberately a range, not a single figure. It estimates the cost of the status quo — what staying costs you — and never represents a price for ModernLift's services.