TCO in Digital Commerce: Why “Composable” Alone Isn’t Enough

While cumbersome monoliths become increasingly expensive over time, the rise of composable (MACH-based) commerce platforms promised a lower Total Cost of Ownership. But today, leading enterprises are realizing that “composable” alone is not the final answer. Here’s what you need to know.

TL;DR

• Composable solutions were a critical step beyond legacy, monolithic systems—but they’re not the finish line.
• Integrations, custom code, and hidden complexity in composable architectures drive up Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and slow down change.
• The real breakthrough? Post-composable commerce platforms that combine the flexibility of MACH with a no-code orchestration layer, enabling true business agility and operational efficiency.
• Legacy monoliths still accumulate technical debt, but even composable stacks can create their own version of the same trap—just in a new layer.
• Post-composable solutions help minimize unproductive IT work, reduce integration overhead, and maximize business productivity by empowering teams to drive change directly.

What is the Total Cost of Ownership and why does it matter more than ever?

TCO is a key metric for businesses to make valid decisions about their investments. By considering all the costs associated with acquiring and operating a technology or service, TCO provides a broad overview of the financial impact of an investment over time. 

When making strategic technology decisions, considering the TCO is key, especially in cost-critical businesses. Understanding the TCO enables decision makers to take informed procurement decisions and assess how the technology supports achieving business goals.

How is the TCO calculated? 

When calculating the Total Cost of Ownership of technology, an IT system or platform for digital commerce, it is necessary to take into account all the costs of selecting, building, deploying and maintaining it over a certain period of time, e.g., three to five years.

Costs to consider when calculating the TCO

• Upfront costs: Selection, evaluation, planning, and preparing your business environment.
• Implementation costs: Development, customization, integration, migration, and training.
• Operational costs: Infrastructure, data, hosting, licenses and subscriptions, scaling, security, support, and ongoing maintenance.
• Hidden costs: Integration complexity, technical debt, maintenance of custom code, and process management.

In the post-composable era, hidden costs take center stage.

While composable platforms promised lower TCO by breaking up monoliths, many businesses found that these hidden costs merely shifted—from rigid legacy software to sprawling integration landscapes and expensive customizations.

That’s why it’s not enough to compare TCO line by line. To make smart technology decisions today, you need to account for all the extra cost drivers that emerge when systems are stitched together and constantly adapted.

Hidden Costs: The New Reality

Both monolithic and composable architectures can trap companies in cycles of high integration and maintenance costs:

• Technical debt isn’t just a monolith problem anymore; in composable systems, it often appears as a tangle of integrations, custom APIs, and brittle process logic.
• Total Cost of Change (TCC) can spike if every process adjustment requires developer work or coordination across multiple systems.
• Total Spend Productivity (TSP) suffers when too much budget is spent maintaining integrations instead of driving business value.

The Composable Ceiling—and What Comes Next

Composable commerce solved the rigidity of monoliths, but created a new set of challenges:

• Integrating best-of-breed components sounds great, but custom development and orchestration quickly become bottlenecks.
• IT teams often spend more time “gluing” systems together than enabling real innovation.
• Business teams still depend on IT for changes—defeating the promise of business agility.

Enter the Post-Composable Era: Orchestration at the Core

To truly control TCO, enterprises need more than modular technology—they need orchestrated, business-driven processes that minimize complexity and empower change. That’s why the next evolution in digital commerce is Post-Composable.

How Post-Composable Commerce Keeps TCO Low

Here’s how orchestration and agentic automation make a measurable difference

• No-Code Orchestration
  Empower business users to design and adapt processes visually—without costly developer involvement or change requests. This means faster time-to-market, fewer errors, and reduced reliance on scarce IT resources.
• Process Automation Across Systems
  Automate end-to-end workflows spanning ERP, CRM, OMS, and third-party apps—without “glue code” or fragile, custom-built integrations. This slashes maintenance costs and eliminates repetitive manual tasks.
• Agentic Commerce Intelligence
  Deploy intelligent agents that monitor data, detect exceptions, and trigger actions automatically—reducing the need for expensive, reactive support and manual interventions.
• Transparent, Predictable Operating Costs
  With modular, orchestrated processes and standardized integrations, you avoid hidden costs from ad-hoc workarounds and minimize technical debt over the lifetime of your platform.
• Business-Led Innovation
  Let commercial teams launch, optimize, or retire digital journeys on their own—removing bottlenecks, accelerating experimentation, and focusing IT on true innovation rather than firefighting.
• Seamless Extension and Scaling
  Add or replace services and capabilities on the fly, without disruptive projects or replatforming. This keeps your architecture agile and your TCO in check as your business evolves.
• Reduced Vendor Lock-In
  By orchestrating best-of-breed SaaS components in a single platform, you maintain flexibility and negotiating power—further reducing long-term cost risks.

How Emporix Delivers Post-Composable Value

Emporix offers a MACH-certified, next-generation digital commerce platform built for the post-composable era. Our solution empowers you to:

• Extend your platform without custom code or high integration overhead.
• Automate complex, cross-system processes with a visual, no-code layer.
• Escape the replatforming trap—operate, adapt, and innovate without massive IT projects.

Want to see how post-composable commerce can redefine your TCO? Get in touch for a personal consultation.