Cost & ROI | Planning Tool

Legacy System TCO Calculator

A tool for business owners and operating leaders. Compare the five-year cost of staying as you are, a full rebuild, and the Foundation First path (preparing your system and adding AI on top). The detailed report is sent to your inbox.

Tell us about your system

Eight quick questions. Rough numbers are fine. You can refine them later.

CurrencyAll numbers in this calculator will be shown in the currency you pick here.e.g. If your team works in pounds, choose British Pound

Roughly how many people use your main system each week?Count everyone who logs in regularly. A rough number is absolutely fine.e.g. 40 users across your team

How old is your system?How many years ago was this platform first built or bought? Approximate is fine.e.g. 8 (just the number of years)

Roughly what do you pay each year to keep it running?Add up your IT partner fees, hosting, software licences, and any support contracts. Your best estimate is fine, it does not need to be exact.e.g. $180,000 per year. Include all IT support, hosting, and licence costs.

Manual workaround hours per week across your teamThink about copy-pasting between systems, rekeying data into spreadsheets, building manual reports, or reconciling numbers by hand. Add it up across the whole team.e.g. 60 hours per week. That could be 5 people each spending around 12 hours on manual tasks.

Advanced assumptions

Average hourly cost of people doing the manual workTake their salary, add benefits and overhead, then divide by their working hours in a year. A rough figure is fine.e.g. $45 per hour for a typical mid-level operations or admin team member

Year-on-year increase in maintenance cost (%)Older systems tend to get pricier every year as the skills, parts, and vendors that support them become harder to find.e.g. 8%, which is fairly typical for a system that is over 7 years old

How critical is this system to day-to-day operations?Think about what happens if the system goes down for a full working day.e.g. Medium, if your team can still just about manage but a day of downtime would genuinely hurt

Your five-year picture

Each path shows the total cost and what you get for it, over five years.

Path 1

Stay as you are

Keep the current system. Pay maintenance. Absorb the manual work.

Total five-year cost

Time to start0 months
AI capabilityNone
Risk trajectorySlowly rising

Path 2

Foundation First + AI

Prepare your system, liberate your data, add AI on top without replacing everything.

Total five-year cost

$42K

Time to first value3 to 6 months
AI capability60% to 80%
Risk trajectoryReduced

Path 3

Full rebuild

Replace the system end to end with a modern, AI-ready platform.

Total five-year cost

$173K

Time to delivery12 to 18 months
AI capabilityFull
Risk trajectoryHigh during, low after

Stay as you are$0

Foundation First$42K

Full rebuild$173K

For your numbers, staying as you are looks cheapest over five years. That usually means manual hours or maintenance cost are under-reported, or your system is still young. Foundation First still unlocks AI capability your current setup can't, which has value the cost model doesn't capture.

+ Why these numbers (assumptions we used)

Five-year horizon. All totals include the cost of running the system and the cost of manual work over that period.
Path 1 (Stay): maintenance grows by 0% per year, plus a small drift cost for brittleness as the system ages.
Path 2 (Foundation First): one-time investment of roughly $42K based on your team size, covering data liberation, workflow automation, and safe AI integration patterns. Manual work drops by about 55% after 4 to 6 months.
Path 3 (Full rebuild): one-time investment of roughly $150K based on your team size. Delivery takes 12 to 18 months. After rebuild, maintenance drops to about 70% of today's and manual work to about 15%.
Manual work valued at $0 per hour (salary plus overhead).
Rebuild sizing uses mid-market benchmarks (USD, converted at 1 USD = 1 USD): ≤10 users ≈ $150K, 11–25 users ≈ $250K, 26–100 users ≈ $600K, 101–250 users ≈ $1.10M, 251–500 users ≈ $1.70M, 500+ users ≈ $2.50M.

These ranges are indicative planning anchors, not a quote. Every real programme is scoped against your actual systems, data, and team.

Want the detailed report?

We'll send a tailored five-year breakdown to your inbox: your numbers, our recommendation, the assumptions behind each path, and a one-page summary you can review.

✓Path-by-path cost detail
✓Year-by-year cash profile
✓Assumptions you can change
✓Recommended next steps

Prefer to talk it through? Book a 30-minute review with our team. No pitch, no pressure.Book a review

This tool is for planning purposes only and does not constitute a formal quote.