Services · 05 · Read it first
You inherited it. Now what.
We read a website or application somebody else built and tell you in writing whether to rescue it, rebuild it or leave it alone. Fixed fee, one day or one week.
You get a written verdict from the people who would have to maintain the code: what state it is really in, whether it can be kept, and what each option would cost. The document is yours. You can act on it with us, with your current developer or with anyone else.
Pick this when
- Your developer or agency stopped answering, and nobody knows what is inside the site any more.
- Updates make you nervous, so nobody runs them, so the problem compounds quietly.
- You have been quoted a rebuild and want a second opinion before you sign.
- You are buying a company and need to know what state its website or application is in.
Most takeovers start as an emergency. The person who built the site has gone, something is broken, and nobody can tell you what is inside. That is a bad moment for an expensive decision, and it is when most of them get made. The audit puts a day or a week of reading in front of that decision, so you know what you actually have.
Why it is paid
A free audit is paid for by the work it recommends, so it nearly always recommends a rebuild. You pay us for the reading itself, and the fee is the same whatever the answer is. The document gives the reasoning, so any developer can check it.
The three verdicts
Rescue. The foundations are sound and the mess is on the surface. You get a list of fixes in order of priority, with the cost of each and what happens if you skip it.
Rebuild. The code cannot be maintained at a reasonable price, and every month of patching adds to the bill. You get that in plain words, with a scope, a price and reasoning you can check.
Leave it alone. The site is fine. You get a short list of things worth fixing, none of them urgent, and no quote from us. We have written this verdict several times. If we never did, the other two would be worth nothing.
What we read
A WordPress site takes one day: the theme code, the plugins one by one, the hosting and the state of updates. A Laravel application or a larger platform takes a week: the architecture, the data model, the tests if there are any, how it is deployed, and which dependencies cannot be upgraded and why.
What we need depends on the site: FTP access, the Git repository, for example on Bitbucket, and the documentation if there is any. For the sites and applications we usually see, you have the verdict within a week of giving us access. It is a document in plain language that an owner can read and a developer can argue with.
What happens next
If the verdict is rescue or rebuild, the scope in the document is the scope we quote from, so nothing that was visible during the audit turns up later as a surprise. The audit is also the only way into maintenance for a site we did not build: we do not promise to keep code running before somebody here has read it.
Not every audit ends with a takeover. We have passed on a few sites, for example because they were built on a page builder, which we do not maintain.
- WordPress
- €400
- One day. Theme code, plugin list, verdict.
- Laravel or platform
- €1,200
- One week. Full code review and a scope for taking it over.
- Output
- A written verdict
- Usually within a week.
- Possible answers
- Three
- Rescue, rebuild, or leave it alone.
Xcruiter
A recruitment platform with paying customers, taken over while its original developer was leaving. We read the code first, kept what was sound and rebuilt much of the foundations. The plain list of candidates became a kanban board, and new features have shipped on the same codebase ever since.
Read the caseWhat we won't do
- Shade a verdict toward the more expensive option because the more expensive option is ours.
- Hand you an automated scanner report and call it a code review.
- Sell you a rewrite dressed up as maintenance.
- Agree to maintain a codebase nobody has read.
Common questions
Can you take over and fix an existing WordPress site?
Yes, after a paid takeover audit. We read the code first and tell you in writing whether it can be maintained as it is. If it can, we go through the plugins one by one and keep only the ones the site needs.
Do you sign NDAs before looking at a project?
Sure. Send yours with the request, or we’ll send ours. It’s not a bottleneck, we’ve signed plenty and nothing in a first message needs to be secret anyway.
Can you migrate my existing site to better hosting?
Yes, and it is often the cheapest reliability upgrade a site can get. We move it onto a proper server with staging and version control, usually as part of taking the site over for maintenance.
Do you host the sites you build?
We run sites on provisioned VPS servers, set up the way a developer would: version-controlled deploys, a staging environment, server-level caching and off-server backups. Not shared cPanel hosting behind an FTP password.
Bring us the plan.
We'll price it.
If this is not what you need, we say so in the first reply.