Advice from people who still ship the code.
Technology decisions are expensive to get wrong and hard to judge from the outside. We review what you have, tell you plainly what is working and what is not, and help you decide what to build, what to buy and what to leave alone. Every recommendation comes from engineers who build and run software every week.
- Plain English: findings your board can act on
- Buy or build: we will tell you to buy when it fits
- Fixed scope: a review with a clear end and a report
- No lock-in: advice you can take to any team
§ 01Overview
Independent advice, grounded in practice
We give you a clear, written view of where you stand and what to do next, whether or not you hire us to do the work.
Many of the projects we see did not need more developers; they needed someone to say which problem to fix first. A slow platform is often one bad query and an undersized server. A stalled rebuild is often a scope that kept growing. We find those problems by reading the code, the infrastructure and the numbers, then talking to the people who live with them.
Our advice is not a sales pitch for our own build. On our own service pages we tell people when an off-the-shelf product is the better choice, and we do the same in reviews. If the right answer is a SaaS subscription, a smaller server or a better process, that is what the report will say.
Where it fits
- A second opinion on a platform that is slow, buggy or expensive
- Deciding whether to rebuild, refactor or replace a system
- Technical due diligence before an investment or acquisition
- A roadmap for the next twelve months of technology spending
- Read, then advise. We look at the code and the servers, not slides.
- Honest findings. Including when the answer is to buy, not build.
- Prioritised. What to fix first, and what can wait.
- Yours to use. A report any competent team can act on.
§ 02What you get
Six deliverables.
Code & architecture reviews
A structured review of your codebase and architecture: security, performance, maintainability and how risky it is to change. You get a written report with findings ranked by impact and effort.
Buy vs build decisions
A clear comparison of building custom software against off-the-shelf products for a specific need, covering cost over three years, fit, risk and what you give up either way.
Cloud & cost reviews
A review of your hosting and cloud spend that finds oversized servers, forgotten resources and quick wins, alongside the reliability and security gaps that matter more than the bill.
Security reviews
A practical review of authentication, permissions, payments and data handling in your application, focused on the issues an attacker would actually find, with fixes in priority order.
Technical due diligence
An independent assessment of a product's code, infrastructure and team before you invest, acquire or sign a large contract, written for non-technical decision-makers.
Roadmaps & fractional CTO
A practical technology roadmap for the next year, or ongoing senior advice for a team that does not yet need a full-time CTO.
§ 03How it runs
Four steps, in the open.
- Step 01
Agree the question
We start by agreeing exactly what you need to decide and by when, which sets the scope and the price of the review.
- Step 02
Look at the real thing
Read-only access to the code, the infrastructure and the numbers, plus conversations with the people who build and use the system.
- Step 03
Write it down
A clear report: what we found, what it means for the business and what we recommend, ranked by impact and effort.
- Step 04
Walk through it
A session to go through the findings and answer questions, with optional help to carry out the recommendations, by us or by your own team.
Stack we use for this
- Laravel
- Node.js
- Python
- Java
- .NET
- React
- Next.js
- React Native
- MySQL
- PostgreSQL
- MongoDB
- Redis
- AWS
- Azure
- Google Cloud
- DigitalOcean
- Docker
- Kubernetes
- Terraform
- GitHub Actions
- OWASP
- Sentry
- Grafana
§ 04FAQ