AEM 6.5 to Cloud Service is widely quoted as a near-full reimplementation. Kentico Xperience 13 to 26 broke backward compatibility. Most enterprises face this cost every 3–5 years. It’s one of the most undercounted items in platform TCO.

Most enterprises use 30–40% of the modules in their DXP plan. The gap between what’s licensed and what’s used is built into every renewal.

AEM and Drupal authoring environments are built around centralized IT control. If your content team regularly waits on developer queues to publish or update pages, that time has a real cost. It just doesn’t appear on your platform invoice.

Vendor lock-in is a cost multiplier. The higher the lock-in, the higher the exit cost, and the more leverage the vendor has at renewal. Low ability to swap tools is the clearest sign the Platform Tax is compounding.

This helps us calibrate your results. If you’re building a business case, we’ll give you a migration cost estimate alongside the TCO comparison. If you’re auditing costs, we’ll focus on where the spend is going.

The gap between a $50K and a $300K migration is almost never about how many pages you have. It’s about how many templates need rebuilding, how complex your integrations are, and whether you’re redesigning at the same time.

WordPress hosting is contracted separately from your build and retainer. Prices shown are published minimums from rtCamp’s named enterprise hosting partners. Actual cost scales with traffic, bandwidth, and environments.