./my-build-is-broken
Bring it back to life.
The freelancer went quiet. The agency delivered on the invoice, less so on the product. Or it runs in demos and stumbles with real users.
This happens far more often than anyone admits publicly, and it says nothing about you. It's what happens when the person paying has no way to evaluate the work.
The path forward starts with one honest answer: what's worth saving?
How it works
1. The audit. Codebase, infrastructure, database, deployment. Three to five days. You get a written verdict: what's solid, what's broken, what it costs to fix versus rebuild.
2. The honest recommendation. Sometimes 70% is fine and three specific things are the problem. Sometimes rebuilding is genuinely cheaper. You get whichever is true, including when it means less work for me.
3. Stabilise. Security, data integrity, deployment. The foundation gets solid before anything new goes on top.
4. Forward. With stable ground under it, the roadmap comes back to life.
What you get
The audit stands on its own. Even as a one-off, you'll know exactly what you own, what it's worth, and what it needs. Founders have used it to renegotiate with the original developer, and to make the pull-the-plug decision with confidence.
First: get control of your own assets
Repo, hosting, domain, database, App Store account. If a former developer holds any of these, that's step one, and I'll walk you through recovering each.
FAQ
- Can you take over code written by someone else?
- Usually yes. Bad code is still readable code. The genuinely hard cases are missing credentials and undocumented production data, rarely the code itself.
- How do I know if it should be rebuilt?
- The data model decides, more than code quality. Messy code on a sound data model is a cleanup. Clean code on a broken data model is a rebuild. The audit settles it.
- What if my developer still has access to everything?
- Then we lock it down first. Repo, deployment keys, database, DNS, App Store. This is standard practice the moment a working relationship ends, and it protects everyone involved.
- Do you do the audit without taking over the project?
- Yes. Plenty of people just want to know where they stand.