Software project rescue: an honest verdict in five days, then a product you own
Your developer went quiet, or the agency is two years past the date, or the app you built with AI has paying customers and you're afraid to add more. A software project rescue at Deepsel starts the same way every time: one week, $3,000 fixed, and at the end of it a written verdict on what you have, what it needs and what that costs. Critical bugs and security holes get fixed during the week, in your own accounts. The verdict is yours to act on with us or with anyone else.
Who a software project rescue is for
Three situations bring people to this page. They look different from the outside and need the same first week: find out what exists, who owns it and whether it can be trusted.
The agency is a year or two past the date
You have paid $18,000, or $400,000, and heard "almost there" for months. What exists runs on their machines, and nobody will say in plain words whether it can be finished or what that would cost.
My developer disappeared
The last message was weeks ago. You have a login or two, a folder of files and no idea what runs where or what keeps it running. The business on top of it is still open.
An AI-built app with paying customers
You built it with Lovable, Replit, Cursor or Bolt. It works, and people pay for it. You're also scared to add more customers because you can't see what's underneath, and every developer you ask says start over.
Projects with far more oversight than yours end the same way. A McKinsey and Oxford study of 5,400 IT projects (2012) found large ones run 45% over budget on average, and 17% go badly enough to threaten the company that ordered them. Flyvbjerg and Budzier (Harvard Business Review, 2011) looked at 1,471 projects and found one in six overran its budget by 200% on average. Those were mostly large, well-staffed organisations with procurement departments. You had a brief and a budget. The question now is what you have, and you can find that out in a week.
The five days of the rescue sprint, and what you hold at the end of each
Most rescue pages say "audit" and stop. Ours runs five days, each ending with something written and sent to you, so you can check progress without reading code.
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Day 1: the keys
We list every place the project lives (code, hosting, domain, database, app stores, payment processor, email, AI tool accounts) and who owns each. Anything in someone else's name is moved into yours or flagged. You hold the access and ownership list by the end of the day.
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Day 2: the read
We read the code and the architecture, run the app from a clean machine and sort what we find into three piles: works, missing, risky. You hold a findings list ranked by severity, written for a non-developer.
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Day 3: security
Security holes first, because customers get hurt by those before anything else: exposed keys, open endpoints, missing permission checks. Fixed and shipped to your environment, each change logged.
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Day 4: critical bugs
The bugs that lose data, block a payment or break a login. Fixed, tested and shipped the same way. You hold a plain-English change log and an app that runs in your own accounts.
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Day 5: the verdict
A scorecard and a roadmap: finish, repair or rebuild, with the reasoning and the cost of each path on our published rates. We walk you through it on a call.
The order matters. Keys before reading, because an audit of code you don't own is a report about someone else's property. Security before bugs, because an open endpoint hurts a customer and a broken button only annoys one. If day one shows that the code can't be reached at all, the week turns into getting it back, and the verdict covers what to do if it never comes.
Software project rescue pricing: $3,000 fixed, and what the next step costs
The sprint is the product. We publish the two retainers so the roadmap can price your next step without a second sales call.
Rescue Sprint
$3,000 fixed, one week
One week, one time, for a product that exists but you can't trust yet.
- Full audit of product, code and architecture
- Critical bugs and security holes fixed and shipped
- Plain-English scorecard and roadmap, yours to act on with Deepsel or anyone
The product on this page. It is the same $3,000 sprint listed on our fractional CTO page.
Senior Product Engineer
$4,000 / month half-day, or $8,000 / month full-time
One dedicated senior engineer, a demo every two weeks, a daily overlap window with US hours.
For finishing the roadmap after the sprint, when someone on your side owns the technical decisions.
Technical Leadership
$15,000 / month
A fractional CTO who takes charge of your technology and answers for it personally, plus the senior engineers who design, build and ship.
- Architecture, roadmap and product decisions
- Senior engineers who build and demo every two weeks
- Investor and tech-diligence support
- Monthly plain-English scorecard
For when nobody on your side can own the technical decisions and the product has to ship anyway.
For comparison, the vendors who publish an audit price sit close to ours and stop at the report: IG Digital Lab charges $1,500 to $3,000 for a five-day audit, credited if you continue; Reflekt charges a fixed €2,500; Fora Soft lists $2,000 to $8,000 and one to one and a half weeks for an MVP-sized codebase (all fetched October 2026). Rebuild quotes for an AI-built app run $5,000 to $15,000 on r/SaaS (February 2026). The sprint includes the fixes, and the rebuild only happens if the numbers say so.
Guarantees on every plan
- Month-to-month, 30 days' notice, no termination fees.
- First 30 days: full money-back guarantee.
- IP yours from the first commit under a US-jurisdiction agreement; repos and servers in your own accounts.
- Any engineer replaced within 7 days if not a fit.
- Happiness Index: you score us every month on delivery, accepted work and incidents. A month under 50 is refunded.
Finish, repair or rebuild: the rule we use, so you can check it
The fear people bring to a rescue is that the new developer will frown at the old code and say "start over". Developers do say that, often on day two. We put the rule in writing instead.
Finish
The foundation is sound and what's missing is features. Your roadmap lists them in the order that gets you to paying customers, each with a cost on the published engineer rates.
Repair
The screens your users know are fine, and the part underneath was never finished. We keep the front, rebuild the back behind it, and your customers see nothing change.
Rebuild
Only when making the existing code safe costs more than rebuilding the same features, or the data model has to be redone anyway. You see both numbers side by side, the rebuild priced the way we price MVP development, against a written scope. A rebuild quote with no repair number next to it is a sales pitch.
For an AI-built app the usual verdict is repair. The screens are real and the users like them. Underneath, the things the tool said were done were never built: the login is checked in the browser instead of on the server, every account can see every other account's data, the deploy only works from inside the tool. That's a repair, priced in weeks, and you keep building with your own tools once the floor is solid (how we build with the same tools is on our AI MVP development page). One owner on r/lovable put the cost of leaving it that way plainly: "im too scared to onboard customers i dont trust it to handle" (April 2026).
What you can check without reading code, and who does the work
You couldn't check the last developer's work by reading it, and you can't check ours that way either. So the week is built from things a non-developer can verify.
Check these yourself
- The access list on day one. Open each account. If it's in your name, the list is true.
- The app running in your accounts. Not a screen recording. Your hosting, your database, your domain.
- A change log you can read. Each fix says what was wrong, in plain words, and what changed.
- A walkthrough on day five. You click through what works and ask why about anything in the verdict.
- A document you can take elsewhere. Show it to another developer. If it doesn't survive that, it wasn't a verdict.
Who you're dealing with
I'm Tim Tran, Deepsel's founder, and I lead every sprint myself. Khuong Pham (7+ years, full-stack React and Python) does the reading and the fixing with me, and Trang Hoang (QA, 6 years of test automation) checks that what we shipped stays fixed. Three senior people, a short client list, a daily overlap window with US hours from Hanoi, under a Delaware corporation.
We have taken over someone else's live system before. The central login of the Swiss federal administration authenticates federal staff, cantonal partners and companies filing electronically, so switching it off was never an option. We replaced its entire front end in stages while it stayed live, plugged into the existing backend where the old one had been, with zero downtime during the switchover. We run Clubloungery, a nightlife booking marketplace that takes bookings and payments, in production too, so the standard we apply to your code is the one we live with.
Other ways out of a stuck software project, and when each is the better buy
Get the handover from the current developer
The cheapest route if they still answer. Ask for the code, the accounts and the passwords before you argue about money. On Upwork, escrowed funds come back to you if the freelancer doesn't respond within seven days, and a dispute specialist can still help within 30 days of a released payment (Upwork, October 2025). A dispute without the code leaves you with neither.
A few hours of code review
Peers on r/SaaS price a senior engineer's four-to-six-hour review at $500 to $1,500 (April 2026). That's the right buy when you're still paying a developer and want to know whether you got your money's worth. It ends in an opinion. The sprint ends in an opinion plus the fixes shipped, which is why it costs more.
Another freelancer
Fast for one defined feature. The risk is repeating the shape of the last engagement: hourly, no written scope, code on their machine. If you go this way, insist on the repository in your account from day one and a demo every week (our guide to risk management in software outsourcing covers the rest of that checklist), and ask the questions in how to choose a software development company before you sign.
Start over against a written scope
Right when the verdict says rebuild, or when the whole first build cost less than $3,000, because then the sprint costs more than the thing it would rescue. A rebuild priced against a written scope is a different purchase: see MVP development, what an MVP costs and custom software development cost.
If what's stuck is a system that has run your company for fifteen years rather than an unfinished app, read legacy software modernization: the same sprint is the assessment step there, and the rebuild happens in stages behind the running system. When the deeper problem is that nobody on your side can own the technical decisions, the fix is a fractional CTO, CTO as a service if you know it by that name, or an interim CTO while you recruit a permanent one, and the sprint is the first week of any of them.
Software project rescue questions
How much does a software project rescue cost?
At Deepsel, $3,000 fixed for the one-week sprint, fixes included. Audits alone run from $1,500 to $3,000 for a five-day audit at IG Digital Lab to $2,000 to $8,000 for an MVP-sized audit at Fora Soft (both October 2026, both vendors' own price lists), and investor-grade technical due diligence starts at $5,000 to $25,000 in the US (Dextra Labs, September 2026). Finishing the work after the sprint runs on our published rates: $4,000 a month for a half-day senior engineer, $8,000 full-time.
My developer disappeared. What should I do first?
Secure what you can reach today: change the passwords on every account in your name, download any code or files you have access to, and write down what you don't have. Delete nothing. If the work went through Upwork, escrowed funds return after seven days of silence and released payments can be disputed within 30 days. Then get a written inventory of what exists and who owns it, which is what day one of the sprint produces.
Will you tell me to throw it away and rebuild?
The default is to keep and repair. We recommend a rebuild only when making the existing code safe costs more than rebuilding the same features, and you see both numbers on our published rates. Most often the answer sits in the middle: keep the screens your users know and rebuild the part underneath that was never finished.
Can you take over an app built with Lovable, Replit, Cursor or Bolt?
Yes, and you don't need to apologise for it. The parts that turn out to be missing are the same most times: logins checked on the server, rules for who can see what, payments that reconcile, a deployment someone other than the tool can repeat, and backups that restore. We find which of those you have, fix the dangerous ones and leave you free to keep building with your own tools afterwards. Our AI MVP development page covers building that way from the start.
I'm still paying a developer. Can I get a second opinion without starting a fight?
Yes. The scorecard stands on its own: what's built, what's missing and whether the work matches what you paid, in plain words. Hand it to your developer as a punch list if you want to keep working with them. It carries no pitch for us, and you owe nothing after the week.
What do you need from me to start?
Read access to the code and a walkthrough of what the product is meant to do. We sign an NDA first if you prefer. If you don't have access to the code, getting it becomes the first job on day one.
What happens after the sprint?
Three options, each priced in the roadmap: finish it with one dedicated senior engineer at $4,000 or $8,000 a month; bring in a fractional CTO at $15,000 a month if nobody on your side owns the technical decisions; or take the document to another vendor. The retainers are month-to-month, 30 days' notice, no termination fees.
Where is the team, and who does the work?
Deepsel Inc. is a Delaware company. I'm Tim Tran, the founder, and I lead every sprint myself with a senior team in Hanoi, Vietnam, on a daily overlap window with US hours. The people on the first call are the people in the code.
If you're starting something new instead, our pages on software development for startups, SaaS development and small software development companies for startups cover how to begin a project so it doesn't end up here.