To this day, I do not understand (despite many attempts from various IT bods on this and other forums) what exactly was wrong with a standard interface of some description to enter events, pay with paypal and whatnot, with a back door audax.net for organisers, that does the maths for all the minute and insignificant AUK awards and those members interested in such awards can check their status on the ancient interface.
The interface isn't the main problem, it's a little dated and a new/fresh/modern interface would probably scare off fewer prospective entrants than the existing system. The backend calculations that decide on awards aren't the problem, they work fine.
The hardware it runs on isn't really a problem (if other bits were sorted properly) and, even if it was, that's a cost of roughly £1000/year, and it's something that could be taken care of once the initial overhaul is done.
The problem is that everything it runs on (in terms of software) is old and dated and needs to be overhauled. Software ages, you can't just implement something once and expect it to run forever. Vulnerabilities are found and if you don't keep things up to date then it's a security risk (especially given that it holds data subject to GDPR). The version of the software you're using stops being supported, the upgrade path to the newer versions is not entirely simple, then there's an urgent need to update one item and you have a huge set of dependencies that mean you need to update pretty much everything.
Updating software is rarely a like-for-like replacement, so tweaks here and there are required and sometimes fundamental changes. This requires time (for testing and implementation) and expertise. These two things (time and expertise) cost.
Surely that could have been developed from standard cheap existing platforms for a couple of quid... but then again, I am no IT person and surely there are a million reasons why virtually all businesses (including cycling ones organising events) can do that, but AUK cannot
The hardware is cheap. The building blocks of software are cheap (if not free). The problem is the expertise in gluing it all together.
Paper is cheap. Pens are cheap. So write me a Booker Prize winning novel please.
Or, put it another way, if I give you the land, all of the building materials and all of the tools required, can you build me a set of six 4 bedroom houses for a couple of quid?
To continue to bludgeon this square peg of an analogy into a round hole, if you want to renovate your house you might be able to ask favours from friends to help you do it on the cheap, and do it slowly and surely so you can continue to live in the house whilst the work is going on. You might have to live with no carpets for a few months but that's fine. Eventually you may get to a bit where you need a professional in (i.e. an electrician) but you can save money by chasing all of the walls yourself and giving him the minimum work to do that someone qualified has to do.
Or you can try and do everything all in one go as quickly as possible, which will involve huge disruption, but you're going to find out all of your friends who would have volunteered here and there will dry up as it is just too much work to do in one go. The only way to do the latter is to pay someone to do the majority of the work for you - this gets expensive very quickly and you don't have as much control over the final outcome as you may have wanted.
I'll leave others to describe how this translates to how AUK ended up approaching this whole problem.