Vibe-coded rescue

Your AI-built MVP is breaking. We rebuild without throwing it away.

A founder ships an MVP in a weekend with Cursor. Six months later we get the email. Stripe is leaking, Supabase is wide open, four auth patterns coexist, every senior who looks at the codebase quits within a week. We take this kind of project on weekly. Same defects every time. Same rescue every time.

Send us the repo Read the FAQ

Founder

“Free Pro tier unlocked from the browser console.”

Auditor

“Supabase or Firestore is open to anonymous reads.”

Engineer

“.env is in the repo. NEXT_PUBLIC_*_SECRET exists.”

Investor

“Four auth patterns live in one codebase.”

Co-founder

“Zero tests. Zero observability.”

Hire

“No senior engineer will touch the code for a salary.”

If you see this, this is you

The signals.
What they actually mean.

“Free Pro tier unlocked from the browser console.”

Paywalls are enforced in React. The API does not check the user plan. Anyone with DevTools is on the paid plan.

“Supabase or Firestore is open to anonymous reads.”

RLS was off by default. The agent never turned it on. Wiz finds these in public scans.

“.env is in the repo. NEXT_PUBLIC_*_SECRET exists.”

Provider keys are in the client bundle. OpenAI charges drained the founder's card before he noticed.

“Four auth patterns live in one codebase.”

NextAuth, Supabase Auth, a custom JWT cookie, and a Stripe email link. The agent added each as needs arose. Nobody removed the old ones.

“Zero tests. Zero observability.”

The first sign of any bug is a Slack screenshot from a confused user. The founder thinks tests are v2. They are the only thing standing between the product and silent data loss.

“No senior engineer will touch the code for a salary.”

Every hire quits within a week. The founder is alone with a codebase he cannot read.

Our process

Five steps. 14 days.

012 days

Audit

We clone the repo and run our eleven-grep playbook. Score: how many defects, how deep. One-page report inside 48 hours.

021 day

Triage

Three piles: keep, rewrite, delete. Roughly 60/30/10. The UI usually survives. The data layer rarely does.

035–8 days

Foundation

Migrate auth to one provider. Lock down RLS. Rotate every key. Add Sentry, structured logs, CI with a real test suite. No new features ship in this window.

042–3 days

Migration

Move production customers to the new stack, one at a time, zero downtime. Old stack runs in parallel for 72 hours then shuts.

051 day

Handoff

Documented. CI green. Claude Code or Cursor still works on the new codebase, but inside guardrails. You can ship features the same week.

What we do with the code

Three piles. Honest splits.

Keep

60%

Marketing site, brand, UI, anything stateless and reviewable.

Rewrite

30%

Auth, payments, anything multi-tenant or AI-tool-connected.

Delete

10%

Dead routes, ghost integrations, four ChatGPT calls the agent added in case they were needed.

Verdict

Who this is for.

Most agencies hear vibe-coded MVP with three customers and quote a from-scratch rebuild. We do not. The product won the customer. We do not throw the product away. We replace the engine. From $500 up to $12.5K, no churn during the rescue, no thrown-away brand. Founders walk out shipping new features by week three. If your codebase is older than six months and was built by humans with normal engineering practice, you do not need this. You need a fractional CTO. Tell us in the email.

FAQ

Questions founders ask.

Will my customers notice during the rescue?

No. We run the old stack in parallel for 72 hours during migration. Cutover is per-customer, zero downtime. Average churn during our last three rescues was zero.

Do you delete the code my last engineer wrote?

Mostly no. Roughly 60 percent stays. The UI usually survives untouched. We rewrite auth, the database layer, the payment flow, and anything multi-tenant. Everything stateless and reviewable stays.

What if my MVP is on Vercel + Supabase + Stripe + Clerk?

That is exactly the stack we rescue most often. We have a ready playbook for that combination. Faster than starting from a less-common stack.

Can we keep using Claude Code or Cursor after?

Yes. We leave the codebase set up for AI-assisted development, but with guardrails: typed schemas, tests on critical paths, a CLAUDE.md that scopes the agent. The agent helps. The agent does not own the codebase.

How fast can we start?

We can clone and audit your repo today. Triage report inside 48 hours. Rescue work usually starts within 7 days of the audit.

Deep reads

Long-form on this exact problem.

blog.startmatter.com· 7 mins

Ten Vibe-Coded Apps. Same Seven Defects Every Time.

Pattern report from rewriting ten vibe-coded apps in 2026. Client-side auth, open Supabase, secrets in git, four parallel auth patterns.

blog.startmatter.com· 7 mins

Vibe-Coded MVP: The Five-Step Exit Ramp to Production

Five-step playbook for moving a vibe-coded prototype into a production codebase. Freeze, triage by blast radius, ship without losing the brand.

blog.startmatter.com· 9 mins

How We Rebuilt a Cursor-Built MVP in 14 Days. No Customer Lost.

Two-week rescue of a vibe-coded SaaS with three paying customers. What we kept, what we rewrote, what it cost. $14K, zero downtime.

blog.startmatter.com· 8 mins

Anatomy of a Vibe-Coded SaaS: Eleven Grep Checks Before Lunch

Eleven concrete defects you can grep for in any vibe-coded SaaS in under thirty minutes. Each one a fingerprint of a project that shipped without review.

blog.startmatter.com· 8 mins

Your AI-Built Supabase Is One Curl From a Leak. Eight Checks for Tonight.

RLS holes, public buckets, leaked service-role keys. Eight Supabase security checks every founder of a vibe-coded app should run tonight.

blog.startmatter.com· 7 mins

AI Wrote It in a Weekend. We Billed $40K to Ship.

Itemized breakdown of turning a vibe-coded weekend MVP into production-ready SaaS. Three real rescues, eight line items, real dollar numbers.

Ask anything

Got a question about vibe-coded rescue?

Frequent questions

Valery Satsura

CEO · Start Matter · usually replies in minutes

Hey, I'm Valery. Ask anything about vibe-coded rescue. I usually reply in minutes.

Engagement shape

This is one of our services.

Same engagement, on the services index: Vibe Code Rescue from $500. Quote in 24 hours, audit free for 48 hours.

See the service page Compare to Cursor MVP

Other ways we engage

Not ready for a full rescue?
Start smaller.

Agency transfer

Your dev team stopped shipping. We pick up where they failed.

14 days · $500–$15K

Your AI-built MVP is breaking. We rebuild without throwing it away.

The signals.What they actually mean.

Five steps. 14 days.

Audit

Triage

Foundation

Migration

Handoff

Three piles. Honest splits.

Keep

Rewrite

Delete

Who this is for.

Questions founders ask.

Will my customers notice during the rescue?

Do you delete the code my last engineer wrote?

What if my MVP is on Vercel + Supabase + Stripe + Clerk?

Can we keep using Claude Code or Cursor after?

How fast can we start?

Long-form on this exact problem.

Got a question about vibe-coded rescue?

This is one of our services.

Not ready for a full rescue?Start smaller.

Your dev team stopped shipping. We pick up where they failed.

Lovable shipped fast. We fix what's actually broken underneath.

Bolt shipped it in the browser. We fix what breaks outside it.

Replit Agent built it fast. We fix what it broke along the way.

Cursor moved fast in your codebase. We check what it moved.

v0 built the UI. We build what it was never meant to.

Claude Code followed most of your rules. We fix the rest.

Windsurf doesn't exist anymore. The codebase it built still does.

Your app keeps crashing. We find why, not just where.

Every new feature breaks three old ones. We untangle why.

Your database is a mess. We fix it without losing data.

Zero tests. We add coverage where a bug actually costs you.

Stripe payments are broken. Usually it's the webhook layer.

Your bill tripled and nobody knows why. We find the leak.

Antigravity moved fast in your codebase. We check what it deleted.

Just the audit. No rebuild.

Ship a single feature.

A senior in the room.

Send us the repo.We reply in 48 hours.

The signals.
What they actually mean.

Not ready for a full rescue?
Start smaller.

Send us the repo.
We reply in 48 hours.