“At the same price” is credible only when both parties use the same cost baseline. The visible license invoice is rarely the complete economic burden of an operational system. At the same time, a business case must not treat every inefficiency as a guaranteed saving.
Capture direct cost
Start with licenses, maintenance, hosting, databases, infrastructure, backup, monitoring and contracted support. Add external providers, mandatory upgrades and fees for integrations or additional environments.
Separate one-off and recurring cost. A historical implementation is not a current annual expense; a recurring upgrade obligation is.
Make internal work visible
Estimate administration, user management, error resolution, manual data transfer and recurring reporting using traceable volumes and samples rather than blanket percentages. Pay particular attention to people whose individual knowledge stabilizes operations.
Not all manual work disappears. Domain review or four-eyes approval may be intentionally required. Count only effort the target system can genuinely remove or reduce.
Do not treat risk as guaranteed saving
Outages, vulnerabilities and missing knowledge have economic meaning but uncertain occurrence. Model them as risk scenarios with likelihood and impact, not fixed annual savings. Apply the same discipline to opportunity cost from slow change.
Cost the target completely
The new solution includes development or implementation, migration, integration, training, operations, support, security and evolution. Agree which services sit inside the target price and how additional requirements are handled.
The FinOps Foundation emphasizes shared responsibility and transparent allocation of technology cost. The idea applies beyond cloud spending: domain, finance, IT and engineering need one common model.
Compare ranges
Create conservative, realistic and stressed cases. Record every assumption, source and owner. A baseline is dependable when another person can understand and update it.
Only this system audit supports a qualified target statement. Some systems can be replaced at comparable total cost; migration, regulation or integration scope may require a different model elsewhere. Transparency is more valuable than a promise made before analysis.