Rescuing a stalled app project

A common inquiry starts the same way: "We have an app that's 80 percent done." Sometimes it's true. Often the last 20 percent is the part that makes it a product.

Send us the repo

The first thing we ask for is read access to the GitHub repository. Not a demo, not a deck. The code tells us in an hour what a meeting can't tell us in a week:

• Does it build? A surprising number don't, on a fresh machine.
• Are there tests? How many pass?
• Is the data model sane, or is every screen its own database?
• Are there secrets committed to the repository? (There often are.)
• How is it deployed? Is it deployed?
• What's hand-rolled that should be a library: auth, payments, sync, crypto?

We write up what we found in plain language and give you three options.

Option 1: finish it

The codebase is sound and the missing pieces are real features. We scope the remaining work, quote it fixed, and build on what's there. This is the outcome everyone hopes for.

Option 2: keep the design, rebuild the code

The product thinking is good but the code is a liability. Maybe it's a cross-platform framework that's fighting the platform. Maybe the auth is homemade. Maybe there are no tests and three different ways of talking to the API.

We keep the screens, the flows, and the decisions already made. We rebuild the implementation cleanly. Because the design work is done, this often takes less time than finishing the original would have.

Option 3: stop

Sometimes the honest answer is that the product needs to be rethought before anyone writes more code. We'll say so. We'd rather lose the project than bill you for building the wrong thing.

What the rescue looks like

Whichever option, the process is the same as any project with us. A written plan you can read in ten minutes. A working build on your device within days. Fixed price. Production grade in as little as ten days for most rescues, because the hardest decisions were already made by whoever came before us.

Paste the repository link into our form along with whatever context you have. We'll read it and tell you which of the three options you're looking at.