A city that hosts the world spends years preparing for a few weeks. The crowds arrive, the cameras roll, the event happens, and then everyone leaves. What’s easy to miss, in the spectacle of it, is everything the city is left holding afterward — including a great deal of software that was built for the moment and now belongs to whoever has to keep it running.
Every large event runs on systems built or scaled for the occasion: ticketing, transit, payments, credentialing, scheduling, the apps that route hundreds of thousands of unfamiliar visitors through unfamiliar streets. For a few weeks they carry an immense load. Then the load vanishes overnight — but the systems don’t. They sit there, still running, still costing money, still needing security updates, often tied to vendors on contracts that outlast the reason they were signed.
This is the part of “legacy” no one photographs. A system doesn’t have to be old to become a burden; it only has to outlive its purpose while remaining switched on. The city that built or bought it now maintains software designed for a crowd that has gone home — paying to keep alive a tool whose whole reason for existing lasted a summer.
The deeper trap is dependence. When the systems are rented from outside vendors rather than owned and understood, the city is left holding obligations it can’t fully see into — renewal fees, data it doesn’t control, integrations it can’t easily unwind. The event ends; the lock-in doesn’t. The most expensive part of a temporary system is often everything about it that turns out not to be temporary.
The way through isn’t to build less for the moment — the moment is real and deserves good tools. It’s to ask, before the crowd arrives, a question that’s easy to skip in the rush: what happens to this when it’s over? What do we keep, what do we shut down cleanly, what do we actually own rather than merely rent for a season?
Those questions are unglamorous, which is exactly why they get deferred until the answer is expensive. The discipline of building something is inseparable from the discipline of being honest about its whole life — including the long, quiet afterward, when the crowd is gone and the software is still yours to mind.
We think about that whole life from the start — what a thing costs to keep, not just what it costs to launch. More about how we work →