Every IT system has a hidden cost that rarely appears in the budget — technical debt. It grows slowly, makes the system harder to change, and eventually costs more than the system was worth in the first place. Yet few companies account for it.
In this article, we look at what technical debt actually is, where it hides, and how you can avoid it from the start.
What is technical debt?
The concept was coined by programmer Ward Cunningham and describes a simple phenomenon: every shortcut in code creates future work. Just like financial debt accumulates interest, technical debt accumulates complexity.
Think of it like maintaining a property. If you postpone the roof repair for a few years, you save money today — but eventually water leaks in, and what could have been fixed for €2,000 now costs €20,000.
All systems have technical debt in some form. But some architectures — especially those built on third-party dependencies — accumulate it dramatically faster.
Where does the debt hide?
Technical debt is particularly problematic in three common scenarios:
SaaS platforms with plugins
A typical WordPress site with WooCommerce runs 30–60 plugins. Each plugin is an external codebase you don't control. When a plugin stops being maintained, or introduces a bug in an update, the cost falls on you. The more plugins, the more potential security holes and compatibility issues.
Frameworks with breaking changes
Modern frameworks are continuously updated. Each major upgrade means your codebase must be adapted — sometimes fundamentally. Laravel, Django, Next.js — they all have their upgrade cycles, and each cycle costs developer hours.
Code quality in popular platforms
In our analysis of five e-commerce platforms, we measured code quality with static analysis. The results speak for themselves:
- WooCommerce: 622,089 identified errors in the codebase
- Magento: 88,205 errors
- PrestaShop: 108,577 errors
- Custom code (itrab): 322 errors
Each error represents a potential bug, a security hole, or a line of code that makes future changes harder. That's technical debt in its most concrete form.
What does it actually cost?
Technical debt has three main costs:
1. Slower development
The more debt the system has, the longer every change takes. A feature that should take a day takes a week — because the developer first has to understand, navigate around, and test against all dependencies.
2. Security risks
Outdated dependencies are the most common attack vector for web systems. A single forgotten plugin can expose your entire customer database. According to Veracode's State of Software Security, 79% of applications have at least one vulnerability in third-party code.
3. Specialist requirements
Systems with high technical debt require specialists who understand that specific platform's historical decisions. This makes you dependent on individual consultants or agencies — and their prices rise with your lock-in.
Do the math: a SaaS platform costs perhaps €200–500/month. Add plugin licenses (€50–200/month), consultant hours when problems arise (€150/hour), and the annual cost often lands at €8,000–12,000 — without counting the hidden price of technical debt.
How do you avoid it?
The short answer: build with as few dependencies as possible.
Clean code without external dependencies
A system built in clean PHP, HTML, CSS and JavaScript — without frameworks or plugins — has exactly zero external technical debt. There are no upgrade cycles to manage, no third-party plugins to monitor, and no breaking changes to adapt to.
Standard languages that age well
PHP, HTML and SQL have existed for 25+ years and will exist for 25 more. Code written in these languages rarely needs to be rewritten. Compare that with JavaScript frameworks that change paradigms every other year.
Small codebase, low complexity
A custom solution contains only the code that's needed. No bloat, no unused features, nothing to maintain unnecessarily. The system we analyzed in our comparison had 4,380 lines of code — compared to WooCommerce with 1.1 million.
AI-powered development
With AI as a development tool, custom development is no longer more expensive. Code review, testing and documentation that previously required teams can now be handled efficiently by a senior developer with AI assistance. This makes the clean, dependency-free architecture economically feasible even for smaller companies.
Summary
Technical debt is not a question of if — it's a question of how much. Every plugin you install, every framework you commit to, every SaaS platform you rent — they all add debt that you sooner or later have to pay off.
The alternative exists: systems built from scratch, in standard languages, without external dependencies. That's how we build at itrab — and that's why our systems have minimal identified errors in static analysis.
Read our full analysis: We Analyzed 5 E-Commerce Platforms — Here Are the Results
Want to know more about what a system without technical debt looks like? Contact us for a free review.
