Your app works. We make it survive real users.
Production engineering for newly funded startups — one agreed price, and your team runs it after.
- From
- Founder babysitting a fragile prototype
- To
- Team running a real platform
Good engineers know how to build systems. Great engineers know what not to.
Good engineers know how to build systems. Great engineers know what not to.
No startup ever died because latency was 15% too high.
The person who built it will leave.
Then the identity service goes down on a Tuesday. The engineer who built it left for a staff role four months ago. What's left is a black box — no docs, nobody who understands it.
- Day oneConfusion.
- Day twoGuessing.
- Day threeYour customers want somebody fired.
That's the failure mode. Not performance. Comprehension.
Day one · Day two · Day three
The architecture that gets someone hired at Google is not the architecture that keeps your company alive.
The enemy is the incentive, not the engineer who left.
Three things nobody else will say.
Backups you've actually restored
Not backups you configured. We restore your database into a clean environment while you watch.
We'll build 90% — or all of it
Leaving the last feature to your team is the proof it worked. Your call, not a limit.
One price, agreed up front
Engagements start at $40k. Never hourly, and we hate change orders — estimating it is our job, not your risk.
Yes, we rewrite the backend. Your frontend stays yours.
Backend, database, deployment, services — we rewrite what we have to stand behind. Your UI we leave alone. Your data comes with you and your customers see no difference.
- The backend and its services
- Database architecture
- Deployment and infrastructure
- Service boundaries
- Your frontend. Your UI stays your UI.
When security requires it
Auth flows, token and session handling, secrets that ended up in the client bundle. Those aren't frontend preferences, they're the attack surface.
When you want us to
Happy to help with frontend work. It just isn't part of what we insist on, because it isn't where companies die.
"Never rewrite from scratch" was correct when a rewrite meant eighteen months and a frozen roadmap. That arithmetic changed. Patching around a broken backend is now the more expensive path — you pay the tax on every feature you ship afterward.
The prototype's job was to prove the product. It did that. It was never supposed to be the foundation. We keep everything it taught you — the product decisions, the data, the flows, the edge cases you learned the hard way. What we don't keep is the code. The code was the cheapest part of what you built.
We can't promise a mid-level engineer will understand code we didn't write, and we can't own our mistakes in code that isn't ours. The rewrite is the floor under every other promise here.
Your roadmap doesn't freeze.
We give you a completion date, then we build to it. Until then nothing stops — your team keeps shipping features, working the roadmap, finally taking that redesign off the backlog.
Keeps building on what you have. Features, roadmap, the redesign that's been in the backlog since launch.
The new backend, built to the date we gave you.
Then the two meet. The features you shipped in the meantime are the test — watching them go into the new architecture easily is how you know it worked.
Your team ports them. That's the handoff test — real features, picked by you, going into the new architecture. We'll do it if you'd rather. We'd rather watch you do it.
Features built on the old system would normally be waste to port. Here they're the evidence: real work, chosen by you and not by us, going into the new foundation without a fight.
The migration strategy is a deliverable
No downtime. Not an afterthought and not improvised on the last weekend. You get the plan in writing, we rehearse it, and your customers never know it happened.
AI made rewrites cheap. It didn't make judgment cheap.
Rewriting a backend used to mean eighteen months and a frozen roadmap. That's why the old advice was never to do it. That arithmetic is gone — the typing isn't the expensive part anymore. It's why we can put a date and a price on a rewrite at all.
Well, and fast. That part is genuinely solved, and we use it the same way you do.
What happens when this dependency dies? What does this cost at ten times the traffic? Who gets paged, and what do they do? It builds what you asked for, not what you needed — and it never volunteers the question you didn't know to ask.
Infrastructure, data model, failure modes, blast radius, and how those interact. That's still staff-level work, and it's the work that decides whether the thing survives.
You have the same tools we do. The tools aren't the difference. Knowing what to point them at is.
And the failure mode got faster too. The black box in that story took one over-eager engineer a year to build. AI will build it in a weekend now, and it will look correct the whole way.
Ten things, ordered by what kills companies.
- 01
Restores
Not backups you have configured. Backups you have restored.
ProofWe restore your database from backup into a clean environment while you watch, and time it, so you know your real recovery window.
- 02
Failover
What happens when a dependency dies is decided in advance and written down, not discovered at 3am by whoever answered the page.
ProofWe turn things off on purpose and show you the system surviving it.
- 03
Observability
You can answer "what's broken, and since when" in minutes. Not 200 dashboards nobody opens and alerts everyone muted in week two.
ProofA handful of alerts that mean something, each with a written response.
- 04
CI/CD
Every change is tested and shipped the same way, every time. Nobody deploys from their laptop. Nobody is the only person who can release.
ProofA new engineer can ship to production safely without a senior watching.
- 05
Deployment & rollback
Shipping is boring and reversible. Undoing a bad release is a routine act, not an incident.
ProofRolling back is quick, and someone on your team has actually done it.
- 06
Integration testing
Tests that exercise the paths that matter — auth, payments, the thing that makes money. Not 400 unit tests mocking each other into a green checkmark.
ProofTests fail when the product is broken, and don't fail when it isn't.
- 07
Security
The boring parts that actually get people: secrets out of the repo, dependencies patched, auth you didn't invent yourself, least privilege, an audit trail. Not compliance theater.
ProofNo credential in git history, and a named owner for every access path.
- 08
Scaling
Headroom for the load you'll plausibly have, and a known lever to pull for more. Not a web-scale architecture for traffic you're fantasizing about.
ProofWe tell you the number where it breaks, and what to do when you get there.
- 09
Clean code
Clean is meaningless unless it's defined, so: code a mid-level engineer can pick up without a guide. Boring names, obvious control flow, no cleverness that needs its author present to explain.
ProofThe handoff below. That test is the definition.
- 10
Performance
Fast enough that it isn't the problem, measured rather than guessed, with a known answer for where the next bottleneck is.
ProofWe hand you the measured numbers and name the next bottleneck, so you can tell whether performance is actually your problem.
Performance is last on purpose. It's the item we care about least of the ten. Nobody died from 15% latency — they died because the restore had never been tested and the person who knew why was at Google.
We'd rather you didn't need us.
We'll build all of it if you want. But we'd rather do this: near the end, we hand a real feature to your team and stay out of the way.
Usually it's the features you shipped while we were building. Real work, picked by you, going into the new architecture.
You know the handoff worked.
We haven't finished our job.
Almost every consultancy claims clean, maintainable, best practices. This one is testable in public, and we've told you in advance which outcome is our fault.
A competent mid-level engineer who has never seen this codebase should be productive in it quickly — without the person who wrote it sitting next to them.
- The platform itself
- The migration strategy, in writing, rehearsed before it runs
- Documentation that reflects what was actually built
- Claude skills and agent tooling, so your team's AI tools can work the codebase
- The handoff test above
You raised on something you're not sure will hold. That's a terrible feeling.
No sales team. The person on the call is the person writing the code.
- Nobody here works on commission.
- Nobody's pay goes up if your project gets bigger.
- No discovery call with a closer. No account manager. No deck.
We've built at that scale. Most startups need almost none of it.
Companies our engineers have worked at — or turned down offers from.
You don't need a staff engineer forever.
The engineer who can do this is already on a package you'd have to beat. Then you have to find them, wait out a notice period, and carry the salary far longer than the work actually takes. If the hire is wrong, you lose a year finding out.
You need staff-level judgment once, applied to the foundation — because the foundation only gets built once.
The staff engineer you're deciding whether to hire — that's who's doing the work.
How this works
- 01
We find what's missing
We go through what exists. You get the list.
- 02
We build it
Production, tested, documented, deployed. Price agreed before we start.
- 03
You take it
Your team ships the last feature. We stay out of it.
Eight principles, and we apply them against ourselves.
- 01
Great engineers know what not to build.
Good engineers know how to build systems. Great engineers know what not to.
- 02
No orphans.
Not "boring technology" — no technology whose failure modes only one person understood, and that person is gone.
- 03
Comprehension over performance.
Nobody died from 15% latency. They died because nobody could read the system during an outage.
- 04
You're paying for judgment, not labor.
Code got cheap. Deciding which code should exist did not.
- 05
We build it the way we'd build it for ourselves.
The cheapest infrastructure that actually scales. Nothing on the diagram we couldn't defend at 3am.
- 06
Respect the prototype.
Building fast was the right call. The thing that made you fast is just the thing making you fragile now.
- 07
Durability is the deliverable.
Not the code. The state of being able to run, extend, and fix it without us.
- 08
We'd rather you didn't need us.
The handoff, the docs, and the deliberately expensive support all point the same direction.
We own our mistakes.
Three different things, three different answers. Keeping them separate is what keeps this honest.
- We built it wrong
- We fix it. That's on us.
- You want to add features
- Do it yourself — we built it so you could. With the docs and skills we ship, you probably won't need us. We're here if you insist.
- You're making a real architectural change
- Come back. This is the thing we're actually good at, and it isn't cheap.
Don't call us to add a settings page. Do call us before you shard the database, add a second region, or put money movement in the critical path.
If support were our profit center, we'd earn more when the handoff fails. Eating the cost of our own errors is what breaks that incentive.
Who this isn't for
Pre-revenue, pre-users, still finding the product. Keep building fast. Come back when it going down would actually hurt.
Anyone shopping for hourly engineers to add to a team. That's not what this is.
Anyone whose problem is smaller than our minimum. Engagements start at $40k — if that's more than the problem is worth today, it isn't time yet.
Building for comprehension leads to a system that outlives its author; building to impress leads to a black box.
- From
- Black box
- To
- Readable
You built fast and it worked. That was right. But the thing that made you fast now makes you fragile — no backups, no alerts, no one who could fix it alone. We build the foundation properly, once, for a price agreed before we start. Then your team runs it.
You have an app that works. You need one that survives without the person who built it.
Your app survives real users. Any engineer can fix it. You sleep, and you never made the expensive hire.
The foundation is done. It only gets built once, and it's built. Now you just build features. Later expansion is a new project, not an unfinished one.
Find out what's missing before your customers do.
No deck, no discovery call with a closer. The person on the call is the person writing the code.