“$1.3M later, it was still breaking.”

The situation

The company’s product connects to lenders’ loan origination systems and runs automated email and text campaigns that keep borrowers engaged through their loans. The first version cost about $15K, but it was so buggy it couldn’t deliver key features, so an offshore team rewrote it. That second version cost about $37K a month for three years, about $1.3M in total. It was still unstable, still unmaintainable, and kept putting the company’s clients at risk.

What I found

Both versions had the same underlying problem: no proper application architecture. Repairing the second version would have cost more than rebuilding it.

What I did

• Rebuilt the backend and frontend over 14 months
• Kept about a quarter of the existing code, everything worth keeping
• Total cost: $228K, compared with $1.3M for the version it replaced

The result

• Maintenance dropped below $8K a month
• Then under $2K a month, with the system running on autopilot and small fixes and features added as needed