Someone always signals there will be a price to pay. The thing is, the price is not high enough when compared to the profit you gain by continuing down the road you are on now.
Further to this, a lot of enterprise-type companies I've worked at who have web applications, but their primary business isn't tech, just don't seem to understand software maintanence, and as such won't put a budget towards it. Instead they'll just completely replace it X years later for Y times more than the maintenance would have cost.
Someone always signals there will be a price to pay. The thing is, the price is not high enough when compared to the profit you gain by continuing down the road you are on now.