DELIVERY AND PRICING
Two ways to buy this, and one of them ends with you owning the platform.
Migrations are priced per wave, not per programme. Payment milestones are tied to the proprietary component actually being switched off, not to a delivery being signed off. And if you would rather never operate middleware again, we run the platform for you — with the option to buy it outright from year three.
THE TWO MODELS
Who operates the platform afterwards is the only real question.
Everything else — scope, sequencing, price structure, milestones — follows from the answer. Both models use the same method, the same tooling and the same engineers. They differ in where the platform lives on the day the migration finishes.
Turnkey Migration
You run the platform afterwards.
Fixed scope per wave, milestone-driven, with a structured handover built into every wave rather than bolted on at the end. Your engineers work inside the waves; the routes, runbooks, test suites and pipelines are yours as they are produced.
Best when
you have a platform team that already runs Kubernetes, or wants to.
What you own at the end
all of it. Source, infrastructure-as-code, pipelines, documentation, in your repositories, under your licence. No runtime we own, no console with seats, no component only we can maintain.
Managed Integration Platform
We build it, run it and keep it current.
The same platform, operated by us under an annual subscription: monitoring, patching, upgrades, security fixes and support to an agreed SLA, with capacity for new integrations included up to a defined quota.
Best when
you never wanted to operate middleware in the first place — you wanted the integrations to work. Also the correct answer, rather than a turnkey handover, when there is no team to hand over to.
What you own at the end
the option to acquire the platform outright from year three. See below, because it is the part that has no equivalent anywhere else in this market.
We do not quote a two-year programme, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does.
A fixed price covering twenty-four months of migration forces whoever quotes it to price the risk of everything that could go wrong across two years. That risk premium is real money, it is invisible in the proposal, and you pay it whether or not the risk materialises. It also produces a number large enough to need a steering committee, which is how integration programmes end up taking a year to start.
So we price per wave — six to ten weeks, a defined set of flows, a fixed price. You approve the next wave when the previous one is in production and its shadow report is signed. If a wave underperforms, you stop after it, having paid for what you received and keeping every flow migrated so far, along with the licence reduction they earned.
The paradox is well known to anyone who has run this structure: making it easy for the client to stop is what stops them stopping.
THE ANTI-LICENCE
From year three, you can buy the platform and keep it.
Every proprietary integration vendor sells you the right to keep paying. Stop paying and the software stops. That asymmetry is the entire reason this market exists, and it would be dishonest to replace one version of it with another.
So the managed platform includes an acquisition option from year three: you buy the platform outright — code, infrastructure definitions, pipelines, documentation — and continue running it yourself, with or without us. The engagement can end and the platform stays.
We put this in writing because a managed service that cannot be exited is a licence with a different invoice. If we ever stop being worth the subscription, you should be able to leave, and leaving should not cost you the platform.
HOW AN ENGAGEMENT STARTS
Nobody buys a migration on the first call, and we do not sell one.
Each step is worth doing on its own terms and produces something you keep whether or not you take the next one.
Estate Health Check90 minutes, no charge
A working session with your architecture team. We walk your estate, identify the proprietary components, estimate the licence spend in bands, and map the substitution product by product, live in the room.
You leave with: a three-page substitution map for your own estate and a banded saving estimate.
Integration Estate Assessment3 to 5 weeks · €25,000–€60,000
The entry product, and the one we recommend to almost everyone. We scan your artefacts and produce the inventory that every subsequent decision depends on: every flow, its complexity, its measured volume, its dependencies.
You leave with: an automated flow inventory · a complexity heat map · measured volumetrics · a proposed target architecture · a wave plan aligned to your renewal dates · a five-year TCO model built from your contract rather than an industry average · a risk analysis, including what we recommend not migrating.
The price is credited in full against the first migration wave. If the assessment concludes that you should not migrate, you have that answer for a fraction of what finding it out the other way costs — and the document is yours either way.
We do not quote a migration without an assessment. A number produced without measuring your estate is a guess, and the gap between the guess and the reality is paid for by somebody. Usually you.
Proof-of-Equivalence Pilot6 to 8 weeks
Optional, and the right step when the technical objection is real rather than commercial. Five to ten flows that you choose — ideally the ones you consider hardest — rebuilt, deployed and shadow-tested against your production traffic.
You leave with: the flows reimplemented and running · the target platform deployed · a message-by-message shadow comparison report · latency, throughput and resource consumption compared against the current system · a working CI/CD pipeline · a calibrated estimate for the full estate.
The commitment we make: you pick the flows. If we cannot demonstrate exact equivalence on your own traffic, there is no project.
Wave Migration6 to 24 months, in waves of 6 to 10 weeks
The programme itself, priced per wave. Waves are ordered by licensed-core consumption and risk, so the flows that return the most money soonest go first.
Each wave delivers: flows migrated and in production · a signed shadow comparison report · documentation and runbooks · knowledge transfer to your team · confirmation of the cores and licences actually released.
The milestone that matters: payment for a wave is tied to the proprietary component being effectively decommissioned, not to a technical delivery being accepted. We are paid when your licence bill can fall, which is the only definition of done that matters to the person funding this.
Managed Integration Platformannual, 3 to 5 year term
Optional, and available at any point: instead of taking the platform over, you keep us running it. Monitoring, upgrades, security patching, support to an agreed SLA, and new integrations included up to a quota — with the year-three acquisition option described above.
Just signed a three-year renewal? Then this is the right time to start.
The instinct after a renewal is to shelve the conversation for two years. It is the wrong instinct, and it is how organisations arrive at the next renewal with exactly the same leverage they had at the last one — none.
The alternative costs nothing in licence terms. We deploy the target architecture — Camel, Kafka or Artemis, an API gateway, observability, GitOps — and build your next three to five new integrations on it rather than on the platform you are trying to leave. Eight to twelve weeks, your team trained on it, real integrations in production.
Two things follow. Your proprietary estate stops growing, which is the precondition for it ever shrinking. And you reach the next renewal with a proven platform, a trained team and a measured cost comparison, negotiating from a position where walking away is credible.
Three things we will not do.
Quote a migration without an assessment.
A number produced without measuring your estate is a guess, and the gap between the guess and the reality is paid for by somebody. Usually you.
Sell you a licence.
We have no software product, no partner quota and no reseller margin riding on the recommendation. If the honest answer is that a flow should stay where it is, that is the answer you get.
Lock you into us.
The code is yours from day one, in your repositories. Any competent integrator can maintain it. That is the opposite of your position today, and it is the point.
And there is a section for exactly that in every assessment we deliver.
Start with the number.
A confidential assessment gives you a costed inventory of your integration estate and a five-year cost comparison built on your data, not on industry averages. Three to five weeks, credited in full against the first migration wave. No commitment, and no platform change required to run it.