If you’re in enterprise software, you’ve heard this phrase. Usually from someone in a sales presentation. Usually it means “we haven’t tested the upper limit and we’d rather you didn’t either.”
So when our Allegra RMS product manager Rares Ignatescu said it to a room full of airport executives - I had to check. I run AirportLabs. If my team claims something, I want it to be true.
A bit of background. We introduced all-inclusive licensing 11 years ago. Everything included, no limits, fixed price. We did this because the system was built cloud-native from day one. Not “we migrated it to the cloud” cloud. Actual cloud-native. The kind where infrastructure scales like a website and you don’t punish your customer for growing.
But here’s the thing about airport resource management: it’s not a simple database query. Assigning gates, stands, check-in desks, and baggage belts with hundreds of rules across competing objectives is an NP-hard optimisation problem. “Infinitely scalable” in this context isn’t marketing- it’s either engineering or delusion.
So I went through it:
Resources: We run in the world’s busiest airports. Hundreds of assets allocated in real time.
Rules: Operational, commercial, airline-specific, regulatory, safety-configured directly in the UI by the airport’s own team. No service request. No consultancy.
Objectives: Airport priorities shift by the hour-fast throughput, retail dwell time, airline preferences, ground handler constraints. The system models all of them and adapts dynamically.
And the cost model: This is where most competitors fall apart. They charge per resource, per module, per rule-because their architecture forces them to. They can’t predict their own compute costs, so they pass the uncertainty to you. We can. Because we built and own the entire stack, we know exactly what the cloud costs. So the airport gets a fixed price-unlimited everything, no surprises.
The economics underneath keep improving. The latest AMD processors deliver up to 3.5x better performance per dollar than what we had two years ago.
On cloud vs. self-hosted costs - and for peak-driven workloads like real-time resource allocation - the cloud economics are now hard to argue with.
The algorithms that would have been prohibitively expensive to run in real time a decade ago now run continuously. On every allocation. At every airport. And they cost us less every year - which is why our fixed-price model gets stronger, not weaker, over time.
“Infinitely scalable” still makes the engineer in me twitch. But practically? For every airport we serve, we haven’t found the ceiling. And the floor keeps getting cheaper.
If your RMS provider meters you per resource, charges you per rule, or sends a consultancy quote every time you want to change an objective - you’re paying a legacy tax. The technology to do this differently has been available for over a decade. We’ve been delivering it since day one.