The most expensive way to keep renting the same problem.

+ The current licence and tooling stay exactly as they are, so nothing needs to be rebudgeted right away.

– Base licensing runs $2,499 for two cores or $9,499 for eight, and cloud deployments have been billed as high as $14,000 a year for just four cores.
– After November 10, 2026, that spend buys migration advice only, and no protection against new vulnerabilities comes with it.

The rent drops to zero, but the lease on CFML itself doesn’t end.

+ Lucee removes the Adobe invoice entirely, since the engine is free and runs the same CFML code.

– The functionality gap has to be checked tag by tag, because Lucee is not a guaranteed drop-in replacement.
– The money saved on licensing still has to go toward finding and keeping scarce CFML developers, since that cost never went away.

A smaller bill, from a smaller company, for a smaller pool of developers.

+ BoxLang’s node-based pricing starts at $749 a year, a fraction of Adobe’s per-core cost, no matter how many containers run behind it.
+ Old CFML code keeps earning its keep while the budget for new work shifts to a modern language.

– That price comes from a single small vendor and a platform where version 2.0 only left beta in spring 2026.
– The developer pool behind BoxLang is smaller than CFML’s own, so hiring risk moves rather than disappears.

The only path where the clock stops instead of resetting.

+ A ColdFusion migration to a modern stack such as Java documents the business logic first, then rebuilds it, closing a documentation gap that can run twenty years deep.
+ Moving off CFML opens hiring to a far wider pool of developers, frameworks, and tooling than any CFML runtime can offer.
+ Long-standing security gaps, like SQL injection risks baked into old code, get closed as part of the same project.
+ The result is a defined exit from CFML, and the conversation about which runtime to use next does not come back in a few years.

– This takes a real project and dedicated engineering time, since no automatic converter exists for turning CFML into a modern stack.

Best for complex enterprise logic, where long-term enterprise stability, JVM tooling, and strict compliance are required. We extract CFML logic into services, normalize data access, and rebuild on JVM foundations while keeping legacy workflows operational.

This transfer scenario is ideal for Microsoft-aligned ecosystems. We refactor legacy workflows into testable, maintainable .NET services, removing CFML-driven fragility while preserving reporting and integrations.