Software Rescue Services

Five rescues, five different problems, each with a number: a project finished in 3 months, engineering cost cut from $48K to $8.7K a month, maintenance cut from $37K to under $2K a month, and 3 months of AI-written code rewritten in 4 weeks.

Software rescue services cover work on software that never shipped or shipped and keeps breaking. Each tip below is one thing that was done in a real engagement, with its result.

Client names and industries are replaced with Company A to E, to protect their brands and investors.

Company E's founder had hired a small firm that kept building the wrong things. He paid a designer for the interface and the firm built a different one. Updates broke what had worked, the developer disappeared for stretches, and the product was never finished. All he had was a desktop script.

The previous developer had given him a download that was missing pieces. I worked with that developer to recover the complete source code, interviewed developers individually, and built a new team. The project was finished in 3 months.

Company C's content management system was about 6 months over deadline and over budget, with five developers who kept missing feature targets and ignoring the design specifications. Nobody on the team really knew how to use Angular or .NET.

Within a month, working with the owner and the CTO, I identified three engineers who could not follow direction or accept training, and the owner let them go. I trained the remaining developer on both frameworks. The project finished in 3 months, before the money ran out, and $55K was freed from developers who could not deliver.

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 D's AI features were built by a PhD graduate who was let go after a month for slow progress, then by a second engineer hired for the same work. Two weeks later he asked me to review his code. Nearly all of it had been written by AI, and features failed because neither AI engineer understood application architecture.

I rewrote 3 months of code in 4 weeks, spent a month training the engineer in application architecture, and wrote the team's coding practices and conventions into the AI agents' instruction files.

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.