The Number Nobody Calculates
Individual site costs are well understood. WordPress TCO: $4,200-$38,000/year depending on complexity. Drupal: $8,000-$50,000/year. Magento: $22,000-$125,000/year. What nobody calculates is the aggregate. WebPulse detected 8,250,594 legacy sites across 10 million scanned domains. At even the most conservative per-site cost, the global legacy web infrastructure bill is measured in tens of billions.
Where the Money Goes
Legacy TCO breaks down into four categories. Hosting: PHP/MySQL servers cost 10-60x more than CDN deployment for static or edge-rendered sites. Security: constant CVE evaluation, patching, and incident response. Maintenance: plugin updates, compatibility testing, version upgrades. Compliance: audit preparation, documentation, and remediation for framework-level vulnerabilities that appear in compliance scans.
Modern framework TCO: $60-$600/year for equivalent sites. The hosting is CDN-based (pennies). The security patching is minimal (single-digit CVEs). The maintenance is version-locked dependencies (no plugin ecosystem). The compliance overhead is negligible (clean security posture by default).
The Economic Opportunity
If the legacy web migrated to modern frameworks at the conservative end of cost savings — $3,600/year per site — the global saving would be approximately $29.7 billion annually. That's capital currently consumed by infrastructure maintenance that could be redirected to product development, content creation, or business growth. Legacy web infrastructure isn't just a technology problem. It's a global economic drag.
