Application Modernization Services on a Fixed-Date, Fixed-Fee Contract

Ship date in the contract
Fixed fee
Signed acceptance
Legacy retired
AWS Premier Tier

Mactores is the agent-native AWS modernization firm. We run application modernization services on a fixed date and a fixed fee. The ship date is named in the contract. If Mactores causes a delay, Mactores absorbs the overage cost — a contractual clause, not just a promise. You get a modernized application running in production, legacy retired, and an invoice that matches the number you signed.

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Modernize your legacy systems before penalties knock at your door.

You leave knowing whether the date is reachable and what the work actually involves.

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AWS Services Partner: Premier Tier
AWS Specialization: Agentic AI
Incl. Migration & Modernization: 7 Competencies
AWS Service Validations: 17 Validations

60–70%

of engagement hours absorbed by agents rather than billed as analyst time

12 wks

median time to production across Mactores engagements

public case studies with named customers

200+

AWS-certified engineers

2008

building on AWS since — 18 years of production migrations

Top Mactores Clients

All 21 case studies →

Customers include Safaricom, Synaptics, Flipboard, Poshmark, Seagate, HP, Adani, DocuSign, KlearTrust, Tilia, Sterne Kessler and Total Expert.

Mactores runs application modernization services on a fixed date and a fixed fee, with the ship date named in the contract. There is no handoff — the team that scopes the work is the team that delivers it. That is what removes the surprise billing, the stalls between teams, and the hidden fees that stall most legacy system modernization services.

No surprise billing: The price is fixed, and the timeline is fixed. You know exactly when the project will be done and exactly how much it will cost.
No stalls: Because the same team does the discovery, architecture, and development, there are no bottlenecks or delays caused by team handoffs.
No hidden fees: The scope is agreed upon upfront, and Mactores is incentivized to deliver efficiently.
Accountability: Mactores owns the outcome from start to finish.

Scope around the real risk

Milestones, a written description of the work, and a legacy retirement plan — before you sign.

You leave knowing whether the date is reachable and what the work actually involves.

Book a scoping call

Why Does a Fixed-Date, Fixed-Fee Contract Lower Your Modernization Risk?

Roughly 60 to 70 percent of the hours a traditional consulting proposal of the same size would staff for is absorbed by agents. Forward-deployed engineers own the parts that require judgment: target architecture decisions, refactoring trade-offs, cutover sequencing, and the delivery commitment itself. The same engineers who scope the engagement are the ones who ship it.

That structure is what makes a fixed date and a fixed fee commercially honest instead of a sales tactic. Mactores prices the engagement once scope is confirmed, signs a date, and carries the delivery risk for its own delays. That's a commitment with a named consequence attached to it.

60–70% Agents

FDE Judgment

Discovery, dependency mapping, schema analysis, test generation

Target architecture, refactoring trade-offs, cutover sequencing — plus phase-exit acceptance from your team

The commitment, in writing

The date carries a consequence, and the consequence is in writing.

Read the clause that carries the date, the fee and the overage before any conversation about scope. It governs every legacy application modernization on AWS we sign.

See the commitment

What Do Application Modernization Services Actually Include?

Application modernization services from Mactores cover the full path from a legacy application and its database to a production system running on AWS — refactored, tested, and cut over without stopping the business.

01
Refactoring monolithic applications into cloud-native architecture on AWS, using services including AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway for decomposed services
02
Dependency mapping and code analysis for systems with limited or outdated documentation
03
Regression test generation and validation harnesses run in parallel against live workloads
04
Production cutover planning and execution, with rollback paths defined before cutover day and the target environment declared in AWS CloudFormation so it can be rebuilt or reverted as one unit
05
Post-cutover performance optimization and legacy environment retirement

If your primary need is database migration on its own, without an application refactor attached, see the broader Application Database Modernization page for that scope on its own.

Legacy application refactoring

Tell us the application and the source database, and we will show you where that path has already run.

Oracle to Aurora, Oracle to Amazon RDS and SQL Server are the routes with the most case history behind them.

Check your migration path

How Does a Fixed-Date Application Modernization Engagement Run?

Fixed-date scoping

Agents run discovery against your codebase and database: dependency mapping, schema analysis, code complexity scoring. Forward-deployed engineers review the output and build the target architecture and migration plan. Scope, ship date, and fixed fee go into the signed statement of work. This phase produces a number you can take to your CFO, not a range.

Phase exit

Scope, ship date and fixed fee signed into the statement of work.

Build and validate

Refactoring and schema conversion happen against a validation harness that runs parallel to your live production workloads. The comparison data is current, so a regression surfaces the day it is introduced. Regression tests are generated continuously as code changes. You get a customer-signed acceptance checkpoint at each phase exit. Your team signs it before the phase closes.

Phase exit

Customer-signed acceptance checkpoint. Your team signs before the phase closes.

Cutover

Cutover is planned and rehearsed before it's executed. Rollback criteria are defined in advance and agreed with your team. The goal is a cutover your end users don't notice happened.

Phase exit

Rollback criteria agreed in advance with your team.

Post-cutover optimization and legacy retirement

Once the new system is live, engineers tune performance against real production traffic and confirm the legacy system can be decommissioned. Retiring legacy is what turns the engagement into a budget reallocation instead of a new recurring cost. Standing up new infrastructure alongside the old system does the opposite: it adds a line item and keeps the one it was meant to replace.

Phase exit

Legacy system confirmed ready to decommission.

Start at Phase 1

Phase 1 ends with three things signed, not three things estimated.

Scope, ship date and fixed fee, all three signed into the statement of work before build begins.

See how we work

Which Application Modernization Projects Has Mactores Already Shipped?

Claims without named outcomes don't hold up to a sophisticated buyer, so here's what shipped, not what's projected.

Application & Database · Manufacturing

On date

Cutover landed on the committed ship date

Oracle licence renewal became the budget for the next initiative

Oracle to Amazon RDS on a fixed date (Synaptics)

Synaptics' design analytics ran on an Oracle database everyone agreed should move and nobody had the cycles to move: the engineering team was always needed on product. Mactores ran the schema analysis, code conversion and validation harness without co-staffing from Synaptics' engineers, cut over on the date in the contract, and the Oracle license renewal coming due became the budget for the next initiative.

Read the case study

Data Platform · Financial Services

100%

Pricing integrity held through cutover

Frameworks aligned at decision time: FFIEC, SEC and FINRA

Real-time MBS pricing for a Fortune 500 life insurer

Mortgage-backed securities pricing ran on overnight batches, so the trading desk worked from yesterday's signal. Real-time had been a multi-year ambition blocked on cost: every prior proposal added a parallel lineage-and-audit workstream that consumed the engineering budget. Mactores shipped an AWS-native real-time pricing platform with FFIEC, SEC and FINRA-aligned lineage captured at decision time — every signal, model invocation and trading decision traced as the system runs. The valuation logic was preserved through cutover rather than rewritten, and pricing integrity held at 100%.

Read the case study

Application & Database · Payments

Zero

Audit incidents during cutover, evidence available on request

2 → 1

Two prior attempts stalled before cutover. One engagement reached production.

Two stalled attempts, then cutover (branded payments leader)

A regional bank's branded card platform carried multi-year technical debt and two prior modernization attempts that both stalled before cutover. Mainframe-era payments logic now runs cloud-native on AWS, PCI-DSS aligned, with zero audit incidents during cutover and audit evidence available on request.

Read the case study

Application & Database · Payments

Both

Transaction security and operational efficiency, one engagement

Platform swaps — both delivered on the existing platform

Security and efficiency, both (Tilia)

Two prior partners told Tilia that improving transaction security and improving operational efficiency were mutually exclusive. Mactores analyzed both layers inside the same engagement and designed a target architecture that delivered both on the existing platform — PCI-DSS aligned, with regulator-grade artifacts produced by the validation work itself.

Read the case study

All four are Application & Database Modernization engagements: a database migration that freed a license line, a regulated pricing platform that reached real time with its audit trail intact, a technical-debt program that closed cleanly after two failed attempts, and a security-and-efficiency engagement that refused the trade-off. Full detail on each is published at mactores.com/stories.

Ask for the closest reference

We will name the engagement nearest your stack, not the category.

Named accounts and audited figures are shared under NDA during commercial discussions.

Request a reference

How Does Mactores Keep Modernization Audit-Ready in Regulated Industries?

Application modernization for regulated systems has to produce evidence as well as a working system. Mactores' validation harnesses and phase-exit sign-offs are designed to generate an audit trail as a byproduct of delivery. There is no separate compliance workstream to fund afterward.

Framework

Where it applies

PCI-DSS

for systems handling payment card transaction data

HIPAA

for systems handling protected health information in clinical or research contexts

FFIEC guidance and SEC alignment

for financial services systems subject to federal examination

SOC 2

for engagement practices and system-level controls reporting

GDPR

for systems holding personal data of EU or UK residents, wherever those systems run

Every phase-exit checkpoint in the process above produces a customer-signed acceptance record. For regulated customers, that record — plus the validation harness output — becomes part of the evidence set your internal audit or examiner reviews. This is deliberate: agent-native delivery and audit-grade governance are compatible when the artifacts are built in from the start.

Audit-ready by default

The audit trail is a byproduct of delivery, not a workstream you fund afterward.

Bring the scope your examiner cares about and we will map it to the phase exits that produce the evidence.

Talk through your audit scope

Which Industries Does Mactores Modernize Applications For?

The commitment — fixed date, fixed fee, Mactores-absorbed overage risk — doesn't change by industry. What changes is which risks get emphasized in scoping.

Financial Services

Modernization that has to pass an audit. Regulator-grade validation harnesses, FFIEC and SEC alignment, data lineage delivered as an artifact. Data residency requirements are settled during scoping, before any workload moves.

Financial services modernization

Healthcare & Life Sciences

Modernization for systems that have to pass validation. HIPAA and PHI-handling built into the architecture and the cutover plan, using AWS services such as HealthLake and Comprehend Medical where clinical and research data workflows call for them, with the same governance rigor extended to research and clinical workflows.

Healthcare modernization

Internet & Software

Modernization at the pace of your existing release cycle. Refactoring work is scheduled around your deploy cadence. The strategic stakes go beyond velocity: a SaaS product either becomes something agents can call, or it becomes something agents replace. That's the modernization decision a software CEO is actually making this year.

Internet & Software modernization

Manufacturing

Modernization without stopping the line. Cutover planning accounts for operational continuity and industrial data dependencies from day one of scoping. SCADA and OT dependencies are mapped in Phase 1, and the validation harness is what makes a cutover window defensible to plant operations before you schedule it.

Manufacturing modernization

Telco, Media, Entertainment, Gaming, and Sports (TMEGS)

Modernization for systems that don't get downtime windows. Peak-load performance and real-time data paths are validated before cutover. Observability built into the validation harness is what turns "it will handle peak load" into a number you can show your own operations team.

TMEGS modernization

Scoped to your sector

The commitment holds across industries. Which risk gets scoped first is yours to name.

Audit defensibility, downtime windows, release cadence or continuity on the line.

See all verticals

How Is a Fixed-Fee Modernization Engagement Priced?

Pricing disclaimer

Any pricing figures, ranges, or examples in this section are directional and provided for planning context only. They are not a quote. Actual fixed-fee pricing for your engagement is set after scoping and confirmed in the signed statement of work.

Cost driver

What pushes it up

Application scope

More applications in scope, deeper interdependencies, less existing documentation

Database size and structure

Larger data volumes, heavier stored-procedure logic, multiple source database engines

Compliance and audit requirements

Regulated data (PCI-DSS, HIPAA, FFIEC/SEC) that adds validation and evidence steps

Cutover complexity

More dependent systems, less acceptable downtime

All four are settled during scoping and written into the statement of work.

Where the funding comes from

The funding conversation is usually easier than it looks on paper. Most of the budget a modernization program needs is already inside your existing IT spend: the legacy database license that comes up for renewal, the integration layer nobody fully understands but keeps paying to maintain, the infrastructure that's running at a fraction of its provisioned capacity. AWS's own migration-value analysis puts total cost of ownership reduction at up to 40% and notes that roughly 80% of on-premises workloads are overprovisioned relative to what they actually use.

Already inside your existing IT spend

Commercial database licence, renewing annually
Maintenance on an integration layer nobody owns
Capacity provisioned for a peak that never arrives
Extended support on a platform past end of life

Reallocated to the modernization

Refactoring, schema conversion and the validation harness
Cutover rehearsal and post-cutover tuning on real traffic
The legacy line item retired, not run alongside the new one

That is AWS making the case for AWS, so treat the 40% as a ceiling. The overprovisioning finding, though, matches what Phase 1 discovery turns up in most environments Mactores scopes. Retiring the legacy line item is what turns a modernization engagement into a reallocation of spend you're already committing, rather than a new ask to your board.

Make the numbers yours

Put your own licence, integration and capacity lines against the four drivers above.

Half an hour with the engineer who would scope the work, and the fixed fee stops being a range.

Book a scoping call

Glossary Involved in the Application Modernization Services

These terms carry specific meaning in how Mactores scopes and delivers this work. Use this section as a reference while reading the rest of the page.

Agent-native: A structural property of the firm. Mactores is agent-native because three things are true at once: the business only works because agents absorb the majority of engagement hours, every engineer is an agentic AI specialist rather than a generalist, and the contract commits to a fixed delivery date. Remove agents from the model, and it stops functioning — that's the test.
Forward-deployed engineer (FDE): An engineer who embeds with the customer's team, owns architecture and cutover judgment calls, and personally carries the delivery commitment for the engagement. Every Mactores FDE has shipped production agentic AI systems on AWS; the qualifying expertise is agent-native work, not consulting tenure.
Fixed-date delivery: A commercial model where the ship date is named in the signed statement of work, with delay costs for Mactores-caused delays absorbed by Mactores.
Fixed-fee: A total engagement price set after scoping and confirmed before build begins, distinct from open-ended time-and-materials billing.
Rehost / replatform / refactor: Three levels of modernization effort: rehost moves an application with minimal change, replatform makes targeted changes to run better on the new platform, refactor restructures the application's architecture for the target environment.
Cutover: The point at which production traffic moves from the legacy system to the modernized system.
Validation harness: Automated tooling that checks the modernized system's output against the legacy system's output, run in parallel against live or production-representative data before cutover.
Legacy retirement: Formally decommissioning the old application or database once the modernized system is validated in production, including cancellation of associated licenses and infrastructure.
Technical debt: Accumulated shortcuts, deferred upgrades, and undocumented dependencies in a legacy system that increase the cost and risk of future changes.
PCI-DSS: The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, applicable to systems that store, process, or transmit payment card data.

The commitment in full

Read exactly what Mactores is on the hook for.

The ship date, the total fee, and who carries the cost if that date moves — set out in contract language you can check line by line.

Read the commitment

AWS Credentials

Everything above is Mactores describing its own delivery model. This part isn't — AWS runs its own technical review before it grants any of these, which is why it's the one claim on this page a buyer can check without taking Mactores' word for it.

Mactores holds the AWS Agentic AI Specialization, the credential built specifically for agent-native delivery — a different bar than the general AWS Consulting Partner status most modernization firms carry.

Alongside it: seven AWS Consulting Competencies, including Migration and Modernization, the one that applies directly to the work described on this page. Seventeen AWS Service Validations back it further, among them RDS, DMS, and Glue — the same services named earlier for database modernization — plus Lambda, API Gateway, and CloudFormation, named earlier for application refactoring. Mactores also holds AWS Premier Tier Services status, making it one of the leading modernization services providers in existence.

Specialization: AWS Agentic AI Specialization
Partner tier: AWS Premier Tier Services
Applies to this page: Migration & Modernization
Service validations: 17 Service Validations
Team: 200+ AWS-certified engineers
Building on AWS since: 2008

7 Consulting Competencies

Migration and Modernization
DevOps
Data and Analytics
Machine Learning
AI Services
Healthcare
Manufacturing and Industrial Services

AWS application modernization, verified

Every credential here is granted by AWS, so you can check it without us.

The tier, the specialization and every competency are listed on our partnership page and in the AWS Partner Solutions Finder.

See the AWS partnership

Frequently Asked Questions

What exactly does "fixed-date, fixed-fee" mean?

The ship date and the total fee are both set in the signed statement of work after scoping. If Mactores causes a delay past the committed date, Mactores absorbs the overage cost. If the delay is caused by the customer side — pending access, approvals, or third-party dependencies outside Mactores' control — that work converts to time-and-materials at the rate disclosed upfront in the SOW.

How long does an application modernization engagement typically take?

Median time to production across Mactores engagements is twelve weeks. The actual timeline depends on application scope, database size and structure, compliance requirements, and cutover complexity — the four cost drivers settled during scoping and written into the statement of work.

What databases and migration paths do you support?

Oracle-to-Aurora and SQL Server-to-Aurora are the most common paths in Mactores' case history, including stored-procedure logic migration and schema conversion. Scoping will confirm fit for your specific source database.

Do you support regulated industries?

Yes. Mactores designs validation harnesses and phase-exit sign-offs to produce audit-ready evidence for frameworks including PCI-DSS, HIPAA, FFIEC guidance, SEC alignment, and SOC 2, depending on your industry and data.

What happens to our legacy system after cutover?

Post-cutover optimization confirms the new system is stable under real production traffic, after which the legacy application, database, and associated licenses are formally retired. Legacy retirement is part of the deliverable.

Is the pricing on this page what we'll pay?

No. Any pricing context on this page is directional and for planning purposes only. Your fixed fee is set after scoping, specific to your systems, and confirmed in the signed SOW before build begins.

What do you need from us to start scoping?

One line describing the application, the database behind it, and the date you are working against. No RFP, no pre-qualification pack — a short answer confirms fit and proposes a session with the engineer who would own the delivery commitment.

Ask us directly

Holding a question this page didn't answer? That is the one worth a call.

Thirty minutes with the forward-deployed engineer who would run the engagement.

Talk to us

Bring us the application and the date you have to hit.

A license renewal, an end-of-support deadline, an audit finding, or a modernization that has already stalled once. Thirty minutes with the forward-deployed engineer who would run the engagement, and you leave with a real view on the date and the shape of the work.

Book a scoping call Email lets-talk@mactores.com

01
One line describing the application, the database behind it, and the date you are working against. No RFP, no pre-qualification pack.
02
A short answer confirming fit and proposing a session time with the engineer who would own the delivery commitment.
03
You leave with a scoped assessment proposal — fixed fee, fixed date — inside five business days.