Why Postponing Your Rails Upgrade Could Cost More in the Long Run?

In the world of web development, staying up to date with the tech stack is the key to driving business operations with high performance and security.

For a framework like Ruby on Rails, there will always be new major versions released every 1-2 years with frequent minor releases throughout the year. But it is not rare to notice companies sidelining Rails upgrades over other needs. The primary reason for delaying an upgrade is cost.

Interestingly, in recent months, we could see a surge in the number of companies taking proactive steps towards RoR upgrades. The “2024 ROR community survey” with responses from 2000+ developers across 106 countries emphasizes this trend. It signals that businesses began to feel the weight of outdated systems and realize the financial impact of delaying an upgrade.

If your Rails application is ageing and you don’t choose to miss the chance to understand how postponing your upgrade could cost you more in the long run, keep reading. This article will provide an extensive insight on how the hidden costs of delaying your upgrade will compound to have a giant financial impact and why timely Ruby on Rail upgrades matter the most.

Beyond Version Changes: Why Keeping Rails Up to Date is Essential

1. Continuous Improvement and Feature Enhancements

Every new Rails release brings new features, refined APIs, and various enhancements to simplify the development process and improve app performance in one or the other ways. If we take Rails 6, Action Text was introduced. It simplifies the process of managing rich text content and incredibly reduces development time and effort.

In Rails 7, it is Hotwire. It turns out to be a game-changer for developers, as it helps them not rely on complex JavaScript frameworks for building front ends fast. Leveraging these types of advanced toolkits is more about faster product iteration, lower maintenance costs, and a streamlined user experience for businesses.

By upgrading to the latest version of RoR, you can ensure that the door is open for your team to handle complex applications without compromising performance, leveraging the latest tools and techniques.

2. Future-Proofing Your Application

In today’s tech environment, it is important for businesses to keep the application more flexible to integrate with the latest tools and technologies—be it cloud platforms, containerization tools, advanced database systems, etc.

While clinging to older versions, your development needs to re-model significant portions of the application more often to accommodate new platforms or tools, which are time-consuming and expensive.

As your company grows, so must your application's stability and scalability. By upgrading Rails, you can ensure that your codebase is optimised for handling spikes in user activity, new product features, and scaling smoothly.

3. Phasing Out Deprecated Libraries

Postponing your upgrade indicates that your team continues to depend on older libraries and dependencies. As these libraries become unsupported, it will require your team to spend significant time troubleshooting compatibility issues, patching security vulnerabilities, etc. As a result, maintenance burden and application complexity shoot up.

With every upgrade, the Rails team has all the security issues of the past thoroughly addressed. Besides, modern libraries provide better documentation, clearer APIs, and long-term support. By updating to the recent Rails versions, you can adopt more secure alternatives and ensure your tech stack remains compatible with modern tools and applications remain safe from potential threats.

Ultimately, it will enhance your app’s performance, reduce server strain, and drive your business growth.

The True Cost of Postponing Rails Upgrades: How Delaying Rails Upgrades Affects Your Bottom Line

1. Delayed Upgrades Inflate Operational Costs

Frequent Patches and Temporary Fixes

Frequent patches, hotfixes, and temporary solutions become part of the routine if running an application with unsupported rails versions. “Ugh-It does this every time” is something you might hear your team saying often. As older versions lack many built-in optimizations and miss critical updates, your team will be forced to implement ad-hoc solutions to address issues immediately.

In addition to increasing the risk of bugs and degrading system performance, these practices will increase the operational costs over time.

Reactive Spending Disrupts Budgets

As you might know, maintaining an old car takes a lot of effort. The repairs are sudden, urgent, and often more expensive than regular upkeep. Running an application with an unsupported Rails version is similar to this. When situations arise, businesses might need to hire external consultants, invest in temporary tools, or reassign in-house team members from high-priority projects to solve the issue.

As none of these expenses are budgeted, these kinds of reactive spending undermine the financial stability of your business and affect the critical plans in place.

2. Security Risks and Compliance Concerns

Security Vulnerabilities

Older versions of Rails often lack advanced security features such as built-in encryption for sensitive data or automatic protection against cross-site scripting, etc., as in newer releases. Without these features, your application is unlikely to be secure and is more susceptible to breaches.

_“According to Forbes, 2023 saw a 72% increase in data breaches since 2021, and a data breach cost $4.88 million on average in 2024 around the world.” _

While it's true that many companies do stick with older Rails versions, the cost and complexity of custom security measures are relatively higher, as your team will need to rebuild custom components every time a new threat emerges.

Compliance Risks

It is well known that your application can be market-ready only when it adheres to certain compliance standards. By relying on the older framework of Rail, you will fail to get the native support configurations required for modern compliance standards.

For instance, if your application runs on versions before Rails 5.2, it must not have included native support for encrypted credentials. Meaning, your developers must rely on environment variables or plain text configuration files to store sensitive information like API keys, database passwords, and other secrets.

Regulations like GDPR, PCI-DSS, etc. demand strict encryption of sensitive information, and so you cannot choose to skip it. As a consequence, it becomes both cumbersome and expensive to build and maintain custom encryption solutions in the long run.

3. The Financial Impact of Performance and Scalability Issues

Increased Infrastructure Costs Due to Older Versions

As older Rails versions lack many of the speed and efficiency improvements, it leads your application to consume more resources for performing the same tasks. The result? Higher infrastructure and hosting costs.

Whereas by upgrading to the latest version of Rails, your server can leverage the new features for performance enhancements and can handle more requests with fewer resources, which will ultimately reduce the need for expansive infrastructure costs.

Recently, we upgraded Ruby from 2.0 to 3.2 and Rails from 4. 0 to 7.1 for one of our clients, who is a sales software provider for HVAC dealers and distributors. For them, we saw the remarkable result of CPU utilization dropping to 20-30%, memory usage stabilized by 30-40% even during peak business hours, and cloud computing costs decreased by 35%. We double down on upgrading your application to recent versions if you want to keep your infrastructure costs under control.

Scalability Limits on Outdated Version

The demand for any application increases as the business grows. Failing to handle complex queries or real-time data updates can create bottlenecks in your system. When older Rails versions are in place, businesses can run into serious scalability limitations as they can’t take advantage of built-in features available only in the latest versions to enhance scalability.

Thus, to handle additional loads, businesses will be forced to opt for additional custom code, spending more on server infrastructure while dealing with an increasingly complex codebase.

4. Missed Opportunities for Innovation and Business Agility

Built-In Features Reduce Dependency on Third-Party Tools

With the latest Rails versions come a suite of new functionalities and built-in features. Such native capabilities will pave the way for your developers to simplify the development process, reducing dependency on third-party tools.

Conversely, while postponing the upgrade, your development team must do custom workarounds or seek external libraries for pulling off the same functionality in your application.

As a result, you will be forced to allocate more resources for integrating and managing these third-party tools instead of focusing on other crucial projects. Over time, it will also drain the developer's productivity, increase the expenditure for fixing the workflows and challenges in older versions, and hamper the business's ability to make meaningful investments.

Delayed Product Development and Flexibility

In a competitive business market, quick time-to-market is critical for any software products, as options are ample for audiences. Realizing this, every new version of Rails is released with a goal to simplify/accelerate the development process, minimise complexity, and enhance the developer experience.

In the latest version of Rails 8.0, we have several improvements over previous versions (TurboPack and Hotwire), especially for enhancing the app performance without additional infrastructure demands.

At this point of market condition, if you choose to delay the upgrade, inefficiencies in coding workflows and compatibility issues remain and slow down your development cycle gradually. It will consequently lead to falling behind in fast-paced markets and missing new business opportunities.

5. The Compounding Costs of Technical Debt

Delayed Upgrades Leading to Expensive, Complex Projects:

Initially, the decision to skip upgrades and take shortcuts for immediate benefits might seem less risky. However, by the day, the outdated code accumulates, and the complexity of application maintenance will hit its peak. As a result of the technical debt, the upgrade process will boom into a high-cost project.

On the other hand, addressing the cumulative changes (new features, deprecations, API changes, etc) in all the frameworks at once will drain the developer’s team and inflate costs by all means. By embracing upgrading Rails regularly, one can spread out costs, avoid disruptions, and break this cycle.

The Hidden Costs of Developer Onboarding and Retention:

In the age of the AI revolution, technologies and tools are on the rise. Developers prioritize learning opportunities and are inclined towards acquiring expertise in emerging technologies as they can become a sought-after specialist in a particular field and advance into higher-paying positions.

As working with older versions of Rails is more about understanding older libraries and non-standard workarounds, hiring new developers in-house or replacing skilled developers becomes a daunting and time-consuming task. This steep learning curve will directly translate into slower project delivery and higher business costs.

Final Thoughts

Darwin’s theory of "survival of the fittest” is not just limited to life but also applies to the world of technology. To thrive in this competitive space, being adaptable to changes is a must.

Upgrading to recent versions of Rails is not just about accessing shiny new features — it’s a big leap forward in simplifying the process of web development, enhancing the application’s performance, security, and developer experience collectively. By delaying your upgrade, you reduce the possibility of your business keeping pace with industry advancements and consumer expectations.

Moreover, choosing to postpone Rails upgrades and taking a shortcut might be a temporary relief, but it can potentially rise to a significant financial burden in the long run, as we highlighted in this article.

If you are looking for the right upgrade partner or to hire Rails developers for upgrading your application to the recent Rails version, feel free to book a 15-minute chat with our team and get ready to upgrade your application with confidence.