Someone built it. Then they left. It is still load-bearing.
The software still runs. Your people still use it. What you have lost is the person who knew why it works — and with them, the ability to change anything without guessing. That is not a software problem yet. It becomes one the first time you need it to do something new, or the first time it stops.
We take over work other people started. Not by rewriting it on principle, and not by telling you it is all unsalvageable — that is the easy diagnosis and it is usually wrong. First we find out what you actually have.
Five ways a working system becomes nobody's job.
If one of these happened to you on a date you could name, you're in the right place.
The agency or developer stopped answering.
No hosting login. No domain account. No admin access. Sometimes not even the source code. The thing still runs, and nobody can touch it.
The one person who understood it left.
They gave two weeks. The handover was a call and a folder. Everything still works right up until the first thing that doesn't.
The platform you built on is being shut down.
A sunset date, an end-of-life notice, a vendor sold. You have a deadline you didn't choose and records that have to come across intact.
The go-live failed, and now there's a dispute.
Two parties disagree about what was delivered and whether it works. What settles it is an independent technical read, not another round of email.
Something built with AI is now load-bearing, and breaking.
It got built fast, it got adopted faster, and now real people depend on it daily. Nobody can say with confidence what it does or where it will fail next.
A paid diagnostic
from $750Two to five days, scoped on a short call before you pay anything. We read the code, the data and the access, and you get four things in writing:
- What is actually there — the stack, the data, what runs where, and what you own versus what you rent
- What is wrong, ranked by what will break first rather than what is ugliest
- What it would cost to finish or stabilise, as a number and not a range
- What you can do with someone else, so the plan is worth having even if you never call us again
Why it is paid, and why that is in your interest. A free look produces a sales pitch, because that is the only thing it can pay for. A paid diagnostic produces a document you own, written to be useful to whoever does the work — including someone who is not us.
Where it goes next is your call. Most engagements become a fixed-fee Build against the plan, billed per milestone. Some become Managed, where we simply run it. And where the question is really “was this delivered or not,” the honest answer is usually a full Assessment rather than a rescue.
Two of these were rescues before we called them that.
A vendor's AI put a transmission line in the wrong place
Survey overlays had been produced with generative image models. They looked convincing and were wrong — geometry that had moved, an inventory that did not match the ground. We rebuilt the pipeline so every placed feature traces to real survey data, and proved it with guards that fail the build if a model touches the output.
Read the case studyTwo abandoned attempts, then one that shipped
A software vendor had made two runs at the same platform and stopped both — together, more than fifteen hundred commits left behind. We took it over and rebuilt it: it now runs multi-tenant with a hash-chained custody trail and roughly two thousand tests passing. Client named on request.
Two honest limits.
We take a small number of these at a time. Rescue work does not queue well — it is urgent by definition, and the diagnosis is the part that cannot be rushed. If we are full we will tell you that rather than start late.
This is for software a business depends on. If it is a side project, a prototype nobody uses yet, or an app you are hoping to finish cheaply, we are the wrong call and a marketplace will serve you better. The work we do here is worth its price when something real breaks if it stays broken.
Tell us what broke and who left.
Two paragraphs is plenty: what the software does, what happened, and what you still have access to. We will tell you whether a diagnostic is the right next step, what it would cost, and if it is not, what to do instead.
Start the conversation