Low-Code Platform Costs: What These Vendors Actually Charge

Our original budget for low-code transformation was $200k. Final bill after two years? Somewhere north of $680k - I stopped counting after the third consultant invoice. Here's exactly how each vendor screwed us over.

Mendix: The Per-App Pricing Nightmare

Mendix looked cheap at first - $75/month for basic plans. Then reality hit when we tried to deploy more than one app. Each application needs its own license according to their licensing model. Built a simple HR onboarding app and a separate inventory tracker? That's two licenses. Need different environments for dev, test, and prod? More licenses.

What started as a $900/month Standard plan ballooned to like $3,500/month when we realized we needed 4 different applications across departments. Our sales guy was suddenly unavailable when I called asking what the fuck happened to his pricing estimate.

Their "flexible deployment" is marketing speak for "you figure out the infrastructure costs." Cloud hosting fees aren't included in the base price, so add another $500-2000/month depending on usage. Database costs hit us hard - went from basic PostgreSQL to needing proper scaling when we hit real user loads.

The licensing model is designed to catch you off guard. Per-application licensing means every workflow, every departmental tool, every integration becomes a separate cost center. We ended up paying for applications we barely used just because they were technically "separate apps."

OutSystems: Where $18k Becomes $120k Real Fast

OutSystems sales pitch: "Starting at $36,300/year." What they don't tell you is that barely covers one simple app with basic features. Need user authentication? Extra. Advanced UI components? Extra. Integration with your existing database? You're looking at consultant fees.

We burned through $40k in professional services just getting our first app to production. Their platform is powerful but complex as hell - took our senior developer like 6 months to become productive, maybe more. Budget for serious training costs if you go this route.

Pro tip: OutSystems loves to push their "Application Objects" licensing model. Sounds reasonable until you realize that each data table, each workflow, each integration counts as an object. Our "simple" customer portal ended up using 200+ objects. Each object tier costs more.

The Architecture Canvas documentation is decent, but you'll still need their certified partners for anything beyond basic CRUD apps. Integration Studio sounds great until you realize it requires .NET knowledge.

Appian: The Token Trap

Appian's per-user pricing seems straightforward until you hit their AI features. Every time someone uses their AI Copilot or document processing, it burns through tokens. We thought we were being smart with their Standard plan at $12-37 per user monthly.

Reality check: AI document processing alone cost us an extra $2,000/month in token overages. Their "page limits" are laughably low - 20,000 pages sounds like a lot until you're processing contracts and invoices daily. The Process Mining features eat tokens even faster.

Community forums are actually helpful, unlike the other two platforms, but you'll still hit token limits constantly. Their marketplace has decent connectors that mostly work without consultant intervention.

The Real TCO Math

Here's what actually happened to our costs over 24 months:

• Mendix: Started around $11k, ended up somewhere north of $45k after all the per-app licensing caught up with us
• OutSystems: Started at $36,300, ended up at... fuck, I think $156k? Could've been more, I honestly stopped tracking after month 18
• Appian: Started at $22k, ended up around $43k (least brutal of the three, but that's not saying much)

The hidden killers? Training costs ($15k per platform), integration consulting ($25-80k), and the lovely vendor lock-in penalty when we tried to migrate away from OutSystems ($35k in data export and transformation costs).

Industry reviews will tell you these platforms are "transformative." Market research shows the real costs. Procurement data confirms what we learned the hard way.

Two years later, here are the surprise costs that made me seriously consider career changes. Like maybe becoming a bartender where the only platform you need to worry about is literally a platform behind the bar.

Training: Way More Than Anyone Admits

Mendix: Their "free academy" is decent, but you'll still need like 2-3 weeks per developer to get productive. Our team of 4 devs burned $12,000 in lost productivity during training. Plus, good luck finding Mendix developers on the market - you're training your own. Mendix certification helps but takes months.

OutSystems: Holy shit, this one nearly broke us. Took our senior dev - who can pick up any framework in a week - like 4-5 months to build anything that didn't look like garbage. We sent him to their official training ($3,000) and still had to hire a consultant for the first 2 months at $8k/month. The platform's powerful but has a learning curve steeper than learning Japanese while drunk.

Appian: Middle ground. Took our team maybe 6-8 weeks to get comfortable. Their documentation is actually readable, unlike the other two. Appian Academy courses are well-structured. Developer certification is achievable without selling your soul.

Integration Hell

Every vendor claims "seamless integration." They're all professional liars.

Mendix marketplace has connectors, but like half are broken or outdated. Their Salesforce connector shit the bed completely when Salesforce updated to API v58+ - kept throwing "INVALID_LOGIN: Invalid username, password, security token" errors no matter what we tried. After two weeks of troubleshooting, we just said fuck it and hired a consultant for $15k to build a custom integration. REST stuff mostly works, SOAP integrations are straight hell.

OutSystems integration capabilities are better, but their consultants charge $200-300/hour. Need to connect to your ERP system? That'll be $25,000 in professional services, minimum. REST APIs are straightforward, but complex integrations need their Integration Studio.

Appian was actually the least painful here. Their built-in connectors worked mostly as advertised. Still needed some custom work ($8,000), but way less than the others. Process models handle integration workflows well.

The Scaling Surprise

Here's where these platforms completely fuck you over:

Mendix: Database costs aren't included in Standard plans, which is bullshit they don't mention until after you sign. Once we hit real traffic, performance went to hell and we're suddenly looking at $500-2k/month extra just to keep things running. Their "99.5% SLA" means jack shit when your customer portal goes down for 4 hours on Black Friday because their shared database cluster crapped out. Could see the problems in their monitoring dashboard, but fixing them requires upgrading to Premium support.

OutSystems: Their "Application Objects" model is designed to screw you over completely. Every table, every workflow, every API call counts as an object. Our customer portal went from 50 objects to 300+ as we added features. Hit the 500-object limit and got "LifeTime deployment failed: Object count exceeds license tier" - took 3 weeks to upgrade licensing. Each object tier costs exponentially more. Performance monitoring shows the bottlenecks you can't afford to fix.

Appian: Token-based AI billing is the fucking devil. Processing 100,000 documents a month? Your bill just jumped by $5,000. Hit our first token overage and got "AI_TOKEN_LIMIT_EXCEEDED" error - app stopped processing docs for 2 days until billing got sorted. Their token limits are deliberately set low to force upgrades. Usage analytics show exactly how they're bleeding you dry.

Vendor Lock-In Penalty Box

Tried to migrate away from OutSystems after 18 months. Data export tools are complete garbage. Ended up paying a consultant $35,000 to build migration scripts and rebuild our applications on a different platform. Platform-specific code doesn't translate to anything standard.

Mendix isn't much better - their visual models don't translate to standard code. You're rebuilding from scratch if you leave. Module exports are worthless for migration purposes.

Appian actually has decent export capabilities, but you'll still lose all your process workflows and AI integrations. Application exports help but don't capture everything.

Real Numbers: Year 2 Cost Explosion

Our costs in year 2 compared to initial estimates (spoiler: we were fucked):

• Mendix: Budgeted $36k, actual was like $78k? Maybe more if you count all the infrastructure bullshit
• OutSystems: Budgeted $50k, actual... Christ, $156k at least. Could've been $170k, I stopped adding up invoices
• Appian: Budgeted $25k, ended up around $43k - least awful of the three

These numbers assume you don't hit any gotchas. Spoiler alert: you will.

The budget killers? Scaling costs, consultant fees, and the vendors' creative interpretation of "included features." G2 pricing data confirms we weren't alone in getting screwed. Industry reports show similar cost explosions across companies.