App Rescue · Product Engineering
Have an app that's
almost finished?
Don't start over. Whether it was hand-built or vibe-coded with AI tools, we take half-finished applications, solve the technical bottlenecks, and rebuild the parts that won't hold — onto architecture that scales, not just a patched-up MVP.
Where products get stuck
- Idea
- Prototype
- Half-built MVP
- Technical problemsWhere most products stop
- YGLAssessment, then repair
- Production
- Launch
Sound familiar?
The six ways it usually goes wrong.
If more than one of these is true, the problem is almost never the feature you're currently stuck on. It's the foundation underneath it.
“It works on my machine”
The prototype runs locally and falls over the moment it meets real users, real data or a real network.
“The AI demo doesn't survive production”
Impressive on three hand-picked examples, unreliable on the fourth. No evaluation, no guardrails, no idea what the failure rate actually is.
“The last developer left”
You inherited a codebase nobody can explain, with no documentation and no way to judge what's safe to touch.
“It's 80% done and has been for months”
Every fix creates two new problems. The remaining 20% keeps growing because the foundation can't carry the features on top of it.
“Cursor or v0 got it 80% there, then stalled”
Vibe-coded fast, but nobody checked auth, data modelling or what happens at real load — the classic gap between an AI-generated prototype and something that scales.
“We can't get it into the stores”
The build works but submission keeps failing — signing, permissions, privacy declarations, review rejections.
“It's live and we're afraid of it”
In production with no monitoring, no error tracking and no idea it's broken until a user says so.
Step one · 3–5 days
The Assessment
Before anyone proposes a rewrite, the code gets read. We work through the repository, run it, break it, and report what is actually wrong — separating what blocks launch from what merely offends.
What you get
A written audit of the codebase, architecture and infrastructure
Blocking issues separated from technical debt you can safely defer
Security and data-handling findings
A realistic path to production with effort ranges
A straight answer on whether it's worth rescuing
Sometimes the honest recommendation is a rebuild, and sometimes it's that you're closer than you think. You get the real answer either way — that's the entire value of the exercise.
Scope
Everything between here and launch.
A rescue is rarely one discipline, and the target is never just an MVP that limps into production — it's architecture built to carry real load and real users. Most stalled products need work across all four of these, in roughly this order, including a dedicated mobile app development track for iOS and Android.
Assess
- Codebase audit
- Architecture review
- Security review
- Performance profiling
- Dependency and risk assessment
Repair
- Bug fixing and stabilisation
- Backend and API engineering
- Database design and migration
- Authentication and authorisation
- Payments and billing
Extend
- AI integration
- Mobile conversion
- iOS deployment
- Android deployment
- App Store and Play Store submission
Operate
- Production deployment
- Monitoring and error tracking
- Analytics instrumentation
- CI and release process
- Post-launch support
Why us for this
We've shipped the hard parts ourselves.
Rescuing an application means doing the unglamorous work that prototypes skip: authorisation that holds, migrations that replay, evaluation harnesses, cost ceilings, store submission paperwork, monitoring that catches failures before users do.
We've done all of it on our own products — a nutrition pipeline with accuracy thresholds enforced in CI, a search system with a silent fallback path, mobile builds that had to pass two separate store reviews.
That's the difference between a rescue and a rewrite quote. We know which 20% is actually left, because we've been in that last 20% ourselves. And the target is production-grade, scalable architecture — not another MVP patch that stalls again at the next order of magnitude.
First step
Send us the repository.
Three to five days, a written audit, and a straight answer on whether it's worth rescuing.