The support renewal email arrives. Someone forwards it to IT. IT forwards it to finance. Finance asks if anything is changing. Nobody wants to be the person who says “yes, let’s migrate” – because that conversation takes six months, and everyone already has too much going on. 

So the contract gets signed. Another year. Same system. Same limitations. 

It feels like the safe choice. It almost never is. 

What the invoice doesn’t show 

The support fee is visible. It sits in a budget line and gets reviewed at renewal. What doesn’t fall under a budget line includes everything around it. 

The developer hours spent working around the system’s limitations instead of building new things. The integrations that can’t be done cleanly because the data model is fifteen years old and nobody wants to touch it. The AI capabilities that could genuinely change how a workflow runs – but can’t be layered onto infrastructure that was never designed to talk to anything outside its own walls. 

We’ve seen this in a few different industries now. One client in the supply chain had been paying a meaningful support fee every year for a planning system that went live in 2011. On paper, it was running fine. In practice, their team had built a whole ecosystem of spreadsheets, manual exports, and workarounds around it – because the system couldn’t do what the business actually needed anymore. Nobody had planned it that way. It just happened, one workaround at a time. 

The support contract was keeping the system alive. The workarounds were doing the actual work. 

The real cost wasn’t the contract. It was the cognitive load of maintaining all those workarounds, and the opportunity cost of not having something that could actually grow with the business. Those costs don’t show up anywhere. They just quietly accumulate. 

The talent signal nobody talks about 

There’s another cost that shows up even later, and it’s harder to put a number on. 

Good engineers don’t want to maintain old systems. That’s not a criticism – it’s just true. The people you want to hire, and the people you want to keep, are drawn to work that’s interesting. When a meaningful chunk of the team’s time goes into keeping legacy software breathing, it shows up in hiring conversations and exit interviews before it ever shows up in a budget review. 

We’ve had clients tell us they lost two or three strong developers in a single year. When they looked honestly at the exit interviews, the pattern was clear. The work wasn’t interesting. Too much maintaining, not enough building. That’s a hard thing to fix with a pay rise. 

That’s not a people problem. It’s a systems problem that looks like a people problem.

What we see at Mind IT 

When we start a modernisation conversation with a client, the first thing we try to do is get an honest picture of what the legacy system is actually costing – not just the support line, but everything around it. The workarounds. The manual processes. The integrations that don’t exist because the system can’t support them. 

In most cases, the number is larger than anyone expected. Not always dramatically – but consistently larger. And once you see it clearly, the renewal email looks very different. 

The support contract feels like the cost of keeping things stable. It’s often the cost of keeping things stuck. The system that everyone knows needs to go, but nobody wants to touch – most organisations have one. Usually more than one. 

What’s yours? 

Sujoy Roy
(Head – Digital Marketing)

From my teenage time, I had a quench to solve problems and loved leadership. Starting my career in relation management, ignited my passion for managing people. While managing I realized technology needs to be incorporated to keep pace with the changing world & do my work efficiently.