Your licence bill grows with
your own success.
OutSystems pricing scales with the size of what you have built, not with what it returns. Every application you add, every screen your team ships, moves the number the wrong way — and the bill arrives whether or not this year was the year that application earned its keep. Moving to Mendix breaks that link.
Forty-five days to a running, UAT-ready Mendix application — given access to your environment, documentation of what the application does, and a completed application review.
Those three conditions are how we can put a number on it at all. The review comes first, it is where we tell you what will not migrate, and nothing is quoted until it is done.
When this comes up
The decision arrives with the renewal, not with a deadline
Nothing is being switched off. OutSystems 11 is current, supported, and going nowhere — so there is no siren to force your hand, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling urgency rather than an answer.
What does force the question is the renewal. Portfolios that grew the way you wanted them to grow arrive at renewal costing multiples of what they cost at signature, and the growth that caused it is the same growth you were being congratulated for. That is a structural property of how the platform is licensed, and no amount of negotiating this year’s number changes next year’s.
The right time to look at alternatives is while you still have a year of runway and a credible one — which is exactly when nobody feels any pressure to look.
What you get first
We tell you what will not migrate before you sign
The review comes first and it is the whole product. We read your existing applications directly, and you get back a per-application answer: what is in there, what it would take to move, what we would migrate, and — the part nobody enjoys writing — what we would refuse.
Everything you have
A complete inventory of the estate, taken from the applications themselves rather than from a workshop and someone’s memory of what was built in 2019.
A costed answer per application
Not a range for the portfolio. An answer for each application, so the sequence is yours to set and you can start with one.
The exclusions, in writing
The things we will not move, named, before there is a contract. If that list is long enough to make this a bad idea, that is the outcome and you have it in days.
Where it stops
What we will not migrate
Every application has parts that do not translate, and pretending otherwise is how migrations end up six months long with no one willing to say so. These are the ones we name in the review, before you sign:
- 1Applications built on OutSystems' own multi-tenancy
Mendix has no direct equivalent.
What it means for you: That is a re-architecture rather than a migration, and it needs to be decided as one — with its own scope, its own risk and its own number.
- 2Custom code extensions
Each one is a rewrite, priced individually.
What it means for you: A couple is routine and barely moves the estimate. A dozen changes what this engagement is, and you should know which of those you have before you sign anything.
- 3Abandoned community components
Unmaintained, no equivalent, and no source to work from.
What it means for you: We name each one and tell you what we would put in its place. Discovering this in month four is how migrations quietly become open-ended.
- 4Deep process automation
Some of it maps cleanly. Some of it is a different model.
What it means for you: The parts that need redesigning rather than translating are called out separately, because they are design work and pricing them as translation is how a date slips.
None of this is discovered in month four. It is the output of the review, it arrives in days, and it is the reason a date can be committed to at all.
Why this is different
The hard half is the half we automate
Migration tooling in this market handles the data layer — the entities, the tables, the standard screens that fall out of them. That part has been solved for a while, and it is the part that was never going to decide your timeline.
What decides your timeline is the logic and the screens: the business rules that accumulated over years, the flows that encode how your organisation actually works, the interfaces people use every day and will notice immediately if they change. That is the work everybody else does by hand, and it is the work Marcus does directly.
It is why we can put a number on this at all. You are not buying a team that will get through it eventually. You are buying a system that does the mechanical majority, and people whose job is the judgement the machine should not be making.
How to start
One application, not the portfolio
There is no version of this where you bet the estate on a decision you have not tested yet. Pick one application — ideally one that matters enough that its migration proves something, and not so much that it cannot be the first.
You find out what our delivery is actually like. We find out what your estate is actually like. Both of those are worth knowing before anything larger is planned, and the sequence for everything after is set by what the review already told you.