CostLens: Legacy Deployment Twin & TCO Autopilot
9/10
Demand Score
Modernization projects routinely overrun by 6–7 figures due to hidden EDI, licensing, and infra costs discovered post‑deployment.
9/10
Blue Ocean
Competition Level
$4k-30k
Price/Month
Predicted customer spend
14 days
Time to MVP
Difficulty: Hard
The Problem
Legacy Systems and Hidden Deployment Costs
Competitor Landscape
- Apptio Cloudability
- Flexera
- CAST Highlight
- Harness Cloud Cost
- AWS Migration Evaluator
Must-Have Features for MVP
Auto‑discovery agents for apps, data flows, and EDI
Record‑replay shadow environment with load shaping
TCO modeler for licenses, VAN, infra, data egress
IaC generator (Terraform/Ansible) with policy-as-code guardrails
What‑if scenarios (cloud vs on‑prem, k8s sizing, HA tiers)
Change calendar and risk scoring with rollback plans
Cost anomaly detector during pilots
Executive-ready business cases and CFO sign‑off workflows
⚠️ Potential Challenges
- Access to legacy systems for discovery and record‑replay
- Accurate modeling of EDI/VAN/partner charges
- Vendor resistance to license transparency
- Security approvals for discovery agents
Risk Level: Moderate
🎯 Keys to Success
- TCO forecasts within ±10% of realized cost
- Environment right‑sized within 15% of peak load
- Cutover with <15 minutes downtime or zero via blue/green
- Eliminate >50% of hidden costs identified pre‑go‑live
Ready to Build This?
This hard-difficulty project could be your next micro-SaaS success.