Website migration costs are going to zero

Dries BuytaertOct 29, 2026

Website migration costs are going to zero

Within three years, I expect the technical work of moving a website from one platform to another to cost close to zero.

Cheap migrations could change the CMS industry significantly. Some of these changes are already underway, but cheap migrations will push them much further:

Switching costs stop protecting vendors. Plenty of software companies keep customers because of high switching costs, not because their product is the best. When a customer can walk into a renewal with a working copy of their site on another platform, the vendor has to win on price and value.
Proprietary vendors will have to sell the way Open Source companies do. Open Source companies had to build businesses around free code, so they sell hosting and other operational services. As code becomes cheaper, customers will keep paying for the services that keep their code running: deployment, hosting, security, scaling, and monitoring.
Agents favor CMSs they can try. Open Source CMSs can be tried directly, while a proprietary CMS may never get evaluated unless its vendor offers self-service trials and programmatic access. Platforms the agent can access, configure, and verify efficiently have the advantage.
Vendors will pay for agents to recommend them. The CMSs an agent recommends are the ones buyers consider. AI providers will sell some of the recommendations, just as search engines have sold placement at the top of their results. And vendors will pay for it.
The next lock-in is the agent's memory. An agent that helps migrate and maintain a site collects that site's requirements and past decisions. If that memory stays inside one AI provider, changing agents means rebuilding that context. Site owners will want to keep that context portable.
Technical requirements become evals. Instead of relying on vendors' answers to questions in an RFP, buyers will build an eval suite. They'll run it against agent-built versions of their site on each candidate platform. The suite could cover editorial approval workflows, translation management, automated accessibility scans, page speed, and more.
Vendors compete with contract buyouts. Cheap migration leaves the sales contract as one of the few things tying customers to a vendor. The current vendor will try to lock them in with multi-year deals and discounts. The next vendor will try to buy out the remainder of the contract, with credit for what is left or free service until it ends.
Approved-vendor lists become a moat. When migration takes hours or days, security reviews, compliance, and procurement approvals become the slow part of switching. Customers will favor pre-approved vendors. A solution already on the list could win the project even when another CMS is a better fit. Getting approved should become as easy as getting started.
Agencies will recommend CMSs they don't know. With an agent doing the build, an agency can sell a platform its people are not experts in. AI-generated proposals and working demos will make it harder to distinguish those with true platform expertise. Independent proof of expertise will matter more to buyers and agencies alike.
A CMS no longer has to be a ten-year bet. Buyers often choose an established platform because they expect to live with the decision for years. Cheap migration makes a smaller, newer CMS easier to consider: it can win on how well it serves a particular need today, without having to convince buyers it will meet every future need. A tested exit path becomes more important than long-term stability.

When leaving is easy, vendors, agencies, and Open Source projects have to keep earning their customers. Even if only half of these changes happen or meaningfully accelerate, that is a lot of change.

-- Dries Buytaert

PS: Follow the discussion on LinkedIn.