Project Rescue

We can clone and audit your repository today. The written 48-hour audit comes back inside two business days. Active rescue work — repo migration, key rotation, foundation pass — usually starts within 7 days of the audit. For genuine emergencies (production down, security incident) we can compress the audit to 24 hours and start the same week.

No. The 48-hour audit is free. You send read-only GitHub access plus a one-paragraph description; we send back a one-page report covering what works, what is half-built, what does not exist, and where the IP risk is. The free audit is also our qualification step — if your project does not fit a 2–4 week rescue, we say so and refer you elsewhere.

Six sections: (1) repo state and commit history quality, (2) authentication architecture, (3) data layer including RLS and migrations, (4) money handling and webhook safety, (5) secret hygiene, (6) observability. We score each section red/amber/green and call out the three highest-priority fixes. The report fits on one page so you can forward it to your co-founder or investor.

Mostly keep. Roughly 60 percent of the codebase stays — the UI, the brand, the marketing site, anything stateless and reviewable. We rewrite 30 percent (auth, payments, multi-tenant boundaries, anything connected to AI tools). We delete 10 percent (dead routes, ghost integrations, abandoned experiments). We do not throw away the product. The product won your customers.

Yes, and we leave the codebase set up for that. We add typed schemas, critical-path tests, and a CLAUDE.md that scopes the agent to safe areas of the codebase. The agent assists. The agent does not own the codebase. Most founders ship features twice as fast after the rescue because every change runs through CI with tests catching regressions.

We rotate every key inside the first 48 hours of engagement — Stripe, Supabase, OpenAI, anything we find. We assume the old values are in someone's Docker cache, browser bundle, or git history. Rotation is non-negotiable. We also flip any NEXTPUBLIC*_SECRET style variables to server-side only and audit the bundle to confirm secrets are out of the client.

We run the old stack and the new stack in parallel during cutover. Customers migrate one at a time over 48–72 hours, scheduled for low-traffic windows in their timezone. The old stack stays warm for 72 hours after cutover in case we need to fail back. Average churn during our last three rescues was zero.

Five steps over roughly 14 days. Day 1–2: code and contract audit, walk-away email script. Day 3: take possession (repo, CI, DNS, Stripe, database credentials). Day 4–7: foundation work — rotate keys, lock down access, set up CI with tests. Day 8–12: finish the 70 percent the previous team had half-built. Day 13–14: production deploy, handoff documentation.

Usually no. Most disengage cleanly once the final invoice is paid and the notice period is honored. We give you the termination email script. The contracts we have written for clients survive every transfer we have done this year. If the previous team does drag, we step in as the receiving party and chase the handover items ourselves.

Demand the seven-item handover before paying the final invoice: repository ownership transferred to your org, full commit history (no squash), every secret in your password manager, every cloud account transferred, a working README, a runbook, and a scheduled date when their access is revoked. Most engagement contracts assign IP to you by default. If yours does not, we flag it in the audit and help you negotiate.

We flag every clause that affects the transfer on day one of the audit. Most engagement contracts assign IP to the client by default; we have not seen a transfer killed by IP yet. If your contract is genuinely restrictive, we tell you what is recoverable, what is not, and whether the recoverable part is worth pursuing. Sometimes the cheapest path is a clean rebuild on the parts you cannot get back.

Audits start at $1K (often free for warm leads). A focused rescue is $1K–$25K for vibe-coded MVPs and $1K–$30K for agency transfers. The lower end covers small repos with a tight scope; the upper end is a full two-week engagement with two engineers. We quote flat after the audit. No hourly surprises. No scope creep that pushes the invoice past the quote.