Rebuild Cost Floor

Rebuild Cost Floor is the estimated hours and dollars required to move a live client app off a visual platform onto another stack, including schema recreation, workflow rewiring, integration reauthentication, and user retraining. It matters because agencies price retainers on the assumption that the build is an asset they control, yet the floor is set by the platform, not the agency. A portal assembled in Noloco on top of Airtable data can be rebuilt in weeks; a governed semantic definition running on a central engine, the architecture Buzzy uses, may not be portable at all because the app is a definition rather than a codebase. Before quoting any no-code retainer, estimate the floor and write it into the statement of work. Forrester's Total Cost of AI framework, introduced at the Linux Foundation's October 8 analyst summit, makes the same point about AI spend: token counts alone misstate the real cost.