You know the legacy system is broken. Your engineers know it’s broken. Even the support team knows it’s broken because they spend half their day apologizing for “sync errors.”
But when you ask for the budget to migrate to a modern stack, the CFO asks one question: “What is the ROI?”
And you freeze.
How do you calculate the Return on Investment for “fixing the plumbing”? It’s not like launching a new product. It feels like a pure cost center.
This is where most engineering leaders fail. They try to sell a migration based on “technical debt” or “cleaner code.” Business leaders don’t care about code hygiene. They care about risk and revenue.
To get the budget, you need to stop talking about ROI and start talking about COI (Cost of Inaction).
The Hidden Cost of Doing Nothing
The “do nothing” option isn’t free. It is actually bleeding money every single day.
When you pitch this to leadership, you need to quantify three specific buckets of waste.
1. The “Keep the Lights On” Tax This is the easiest to calculate. How much are you paying for the legacy license? How much for the server maintenance?
- Example: We pay $50k/year for the old CRM + $20k for the middleware that keeps breaking.
2. The Productivity Sinkhole This is where the real money is.
- How many hours a week do your engineers spend fixing data issues instead of shipping features?
- If you have 5 engineers paid $150k/year, and they spend 10% of their time debugging the legacy sync, you are burning **$75,000 a year** just on wasted salary.
- That is not “overhead.” That is cash set on fire.
3. The Opportunity Cost What can’t you do because your data is trapped?
- Can marketing run that personalized campaign? No, because the email data is stuck in the old silo.
- Can sales see the full customer history? No, so they lose deals.
- This is harder to guess, but it is often 10x the cost of the migration itself.
Stop Guessing. Use the Calculator.
We built a Migration ROI & COI Calculator to do this math for you.
I got tired of building these spreadsheets from scratch for every client at ClonePartner, so we turned our internal model into a free web tool.
It forces you to input the real numbers:
- Engineering hourly rates.
- Maintenance costs.
- Estimated risk of data failure.
It spits out a single, defensible number: The Net Financial Benefit of Migrating.
The “Build vs. Buy” Trap
Once you prove the migration is worth doing, the next question is: “Can we just do it internally?”
This is the second trap.
Internal migrations almost always destroy the ROI you just calculated. Why? Because you are taking your most expensive assets (your core engineers) and forcing them to do one-off “janitorial” work.
If your engineers stop shipping product features for 3 months to write migration scripts, your Opportunity Cost just skyrocketed.
The Smart Way to Execute
- Run the Numbers: Use the ROI Calculator to build your business case. Print the PDF.
- Show the COI: Walk into the finance meeting and show them that not migrating costs more than the project itself.
- Hire Experts: Don’t distract your team. Bring in a partner like ClonePartner who specializes in engineering-led migrations. We handle the complexity, your team keeps shipping, and the ROI stays positive.
Fixing the plumbing isn’t exciting. But saving the company six figures a year in wasted productivity? That gets noticed.