What is legacy LowCode?

Legacy LowCode occurs when the economic value of your application is no longer in balance with the replacement value of your application. This occurs when the application has a mature status and little or nothing is changed on it. We often see the architecture of software applications on LowCode platforms taking the form of a plate of spaghetti, making it seem like you are constantly changing. A symptom of this is that your application development is not as fast as promised to you by the LowCode vendor because your developers are constantly having to mitigate complex problems that arise from relationships between the various application modules.

In fact, it would have been better if the application modules and application that no longer need to be modified could have been migrated to a cost-efficient platform. Most LowCode platforms do not allow this (lock-in). As a result, you are stuck with high costs for a platform that you do not actually use as intended.

Even if your LowCode platform is not a plate of spaghetti, but a neat set of loosely coupled applications and modules (because you had an experienced team of developers and a very experienced architect build your landscape), then you might want to migrate your application or parts of it to get rid of the sky-high licence fees and possibly your locked-in LowCode platform. So you have three choices:

1. Simply assume to cost of your LowCode platform.
2. Replace your application with standard software.
3. Rebuild your application on a cost-efficient platform without lock-in.

To make a business case, use this calculation as a rule of thumb.  (licence cost in 3 years + service cost in 3 years + running cost in 3 years) > (replacement cost + (running cost in 3 years / 6))

Licence costs are the costs you pay per application, per user or per database (or other special licence calculations).

The service costs are the costs for the service you pay to the LowCode vendor for problems with the platform that you cannot solve yourself (service lock-in).