Professional services
Open source development and migration, costed properly
Moving off proprietary licences can save a great deal — or quietly move the cost from a licence line to a staffing one. The difference is in doing the arithmetic first.
The situation
Licence renewal as an annual event
Proprietary licensing rarely gets cheaper. The question is whether the alternative is genuinely less expensive once everything is counted.
- Licence costs rising faster than the value delivered
- Paying per user or per core for capability you do not use
- A vendor roadmap that no longer matches your direction
- Renewal negotiations that consume weeks each year
- Being unable to change supplier without changing everything
- A product going end-of-life with an upgrade you did not choose
What it covers
What this work covers
Total cost assessment
Licence, support, hosting, skills and migration compared honestly against staying. Sometimes staying wins.
Platform selection
Choosing on maturity, governance and community health rather than on feature lists — an abandoned project is expensive whatever its licence says.
Migration
Moving applications, databases and infrastructure in stages, with a way back at each one.
Building on open source
New development on open platforms, with the licensing implications understood rather than assumed.
Support arrangements
Commercial support or an internal capability, because open source without a support answer is a risk transferred rather than removed.
Licence compliance
Knowing what you are using and what its licence requires, particularly where you redistribute software.
How we work
How a migration runs
Count the real cost
Current total cost of ownership against the projected cost of the alternative, including migration and skills.
Choose deliberately
Assess candidate platforms on governance and longevity as well as capability.
Migrate in stages
Start with lower-risk workloads, prove the operating model, then move what matters most.
Establish support
Put the support and update routine in place, so the saving is not spent on unplanned incidents.
Outcomes
What you are left with
- Licence costs reduced where the arithmetic supports it
- Cost that does not rise automatically with headcount
- Freedom to change supplier without changing platform
- No forced upgrades on a vendor's schedule
- A support arrangement decided rather than assumed
- Awareness of what your licences actually oblige you to do
Platforms and tooling
What we work with
Platforms
- Linux
- PostgreSQL
- MySQL
- MariaDB
- Kubernetes
- Docker
Application
- Node.js
- Python
- Java
- PHP
- React
- Next.js
Operations
- Prometheus
- Grafana
- Terraform
- Nginx
- Ansible
Named as platforms we work with, not as formal partnerships.
Common questions
Questions we are usually asked
No, and treating that as automatic is how these projects disappoint. You remove a licence and take on support, skills and operations. For many workloads the saving is real and substantial; for others the licence was buying support you would otherwise have to provide. The assessment exists to tell you which.
It can be more secure, because the code is inspectable and widely reviewed, and it can be less so if you run unpatched components nobody is tracking. The determining factor is whether you have a routine for updates, not the licence model.
A real risk, and it is why selection weighs governance and community health as heavily as features. A project with one maintainer and a corporate sponsor that loses interest is a worse position than a proprietary product with a support contract.
Either a commercial support provider, or your own team, or us. What matters is deciding before you need it — the most common open source failure mode is an organisation discovering during an incident that support was never anyone's job.
No, and a mixed estate is perfectly normal. Databases and infrastructure often migrate well; a specialist application with no credible open equivalent usually should not be moved for ideological reasons.
It matters, especially if you distribute software. Copyleft licences carry obligations that can affect what you can do commercially, so knowing what you are using is part of the work rather than a legal afterthought.
Talk to someone who has built this
Not a salesperson working from a form. Tell us what the problem looks like and someone who has delivered this kind of work will come back to you, usually within one working day.
Book a free consultationRelated
Where this usually connects
- Cloud servicesMoving to cloud, or making an existing cloud estate behave.
- Legacy modernisationFor the system nobody wants to touch but everything depends on.
- Application development and maintenanceBuilding it, then keeping it running and current.
- HostingManaged hosting for the systems we build and the ones you already run.
- Data migrationMoving data between systems without losing its history.
- Agile and DevOpsShorter release cycles and a build pipeline you can rely on.