Application Modernization Consultant

An application modernization consultant brings an out-of-date application up to supported versions and a maintainable structure. Company A's app was five Angular versions behind; after stabilizing it and upgrading Angular, engineering cost fell from $48K to $8.7K a month.

Modernization means moving an application off versions and structures that are no longer supported or easy to change. CISQ's 2022 report estimates accumulated technical debt in the U.S. at about $1.52 trillion.

I work on .NET, Angular, Azure and SQL Server, and I have stayed on that stack since 2009.

Microsoft ends free support and patches for .NET 8 and .NET 9 on November 10, 2026, and for .NET 10 on November 14, 2028. Angular major releases are typically supported for 24 months.

Company A paid a team of five engineers about $48K a month while the lead engineer rewrote the whole app from scratch, telling the owner that Angular could not scale and the app was too buggy to stabilize. The app was five Angular versions behind, and the team was writing Angular as if it were plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

I spent a month fixing bugs and stabilizing the existing app, with no rewrite, and upgraded Angular to the current version. As the app stabilized, the owner let the other engineers go. Engineering cost fell from $48K to $8.7K a month, and ongoing maintenance and new features now cost under $4K a month.

Company B's first version cost about $15K but was so buggy it could not deliver key features, so a team of American contractors rewrote it. That second version cost about $37K a month for three years, about $1.3M in total, and was still unstable and unmaintainable. Both versions had no proper application architecture.

Repairing the second version would have cost more than rebuilding it. I rebuilt the backend and frontend over 14 months and kept about a quarter of the existing code. Maintenance dropped below $8K a month, then to under $2K a month.