For companies running Delphi · Objective-C · Firebird · old .NET
Two senior engineers read your code, then hand you an architecture map, a risk list ranked by what breaks first, and three options with real effort estimates — so you can finally get a straight answer about what modernizing actually costs.
Fixed price. Two weeks. No obligation to do anything afterwards.
No commitment
You are not signing up for a modernization project. You’re buying an answer. Take it to another team if you like — plenty do.
Founders only
No middle agency layer, no bench of juniors. You get both co-founders on the call — the one managing delivery and the one reading your code.
Fixed scope
Scope is written down before we start. We don’t quietly turn a two-week audit into a six-month engagement.
The problem
You ask three vendors what it costs to modernize your system. You get three numbers between $40,000 and $250,000, none of which are based on anything. So you do nothing for another year, and the system gets one year harder to fix.
An agency spends ninety minutes on a call, looks at a folder structure, and produces a number with a decimal point in it. The number is wrong. Everyone knows it’s wrong. It gets approved anyway, and the overrun starts in month three.
Of course they would — it’s the biggest possible project. Rewrites are where legacy systems go to die: the estimate doubles, the old system keeps running anyway, and two years later you’re maintaining both.
The shops that would take the work don’t have anyone who’s written a line of it since 2015. The ones who could have retired. Your role has been open for four months for a reason.
Discovery is bundled into a six-figure contract. To learn what you’re dealing with, you have to already have decided.
What we do instead
It’s not complicated. It’s just that almost nobody is willing to spend two weeks finding out before they tell you a number.
We open it, build it, read it, and write down what’s there. Every number in the report is traceable to something we saw, and the assumptions behind it are written next to it.
Stabilize, modernize incrementally, or rewrite — each with effort ranges and what you give up. Rewrite is usually the wrong answer, and we’ll show you why in your specific case.
Accounting, invoicing, warehouse and admissions systems in Delphi and Firebird since 2007. Native iOS in Objective-C since 2010, including two years at Endava. This is the work we’re rare at, not the work we tolerate.
Take it to your internal team, to another vendor, or to your board. It’s written to be useful to whoever reads it, including someone who isn’t us.
The deliverable
A written report of roughly 15–25 pages, a one-page summary for whoever controls the budget, and a 90-minute call to walk through it.
Anonymized, but representative — a Delphi and Firebird system in production since 2009. This is the shape of what lands in your inbox.
If the honest answer is “this needs less work than you feared,” that’s what the report says. About a third of the time, it does.
The process
Roughly three hours of your time across two weeks. Most of it is the first call and the last one.
You tell us what the system does, how old it is, who built it and where they went. We tell you honestly whether this is something we can read. If it’s a stack we don’t know, we’ll say so and point you somewhere better — that happens.
Mutual NDA signed before you send anything. Read-only repository access, and store or server access where relevant. One document set, no negotiation theatre.
Before anything else. This is where the surprises are, and it’s the single most useful thing we do in the first week. You get a short note at the end of day 4 telling you what we found — no waiting two weeks for bad news.
Architecture, dependencies, security, compliance. We’ll ask you questions in writing as they come up — usually about why something was done a particular way, since the code rarely says.
You get the document first and read it on your own time. Then we go through it together and you can push back on anything. If the estimates look wrong to you, say so — you know things about your organisation that we don’t.
Who reads your code
A small engineering team in Chișinău, Moldova. We’re new to the US and German markets, and the fixed price and short scope exist partly because of that — you shouldn’t have to take our word for anything.
Co-founder · Engineering
Twenty years shipping production software. Delphi and Firebird since 2007, native iOS in Objective-C since 2010 — including two years at Endava, now NYSE-listed. Built the official iOS apps for Burger King España and Glamour España before Arco Dev.
Co-founder · Client work
I’m not the engineer. I handle scoping, the agreement, and staying reachable for the whole engagement. My background is business development, plus enough WordPress and PHP to follow along. On anything technical, Iurie answers — that’s the reason there are two of us on your first call.
Price
$4,900Fixed · two weeks · no commitment after
Invoiced in EUR at the equivalent rate for European clients. Half on signature, half on delivery.
Larger or multi-system portfolios: quoted after the call.
Included
Before you book
Most of them are. No documentation, no tests, dependencies that no longer resolve, a build that fails on any current machine. That’s the normal starting point, not a reason to decline.
Yes. We work from a read-only copy of the repository and, where relevant, a sanitised database dump or schema export. We don’t need real customer records to read code, and we’d rather not have them.
Then you’ve spent $4,900 to avoid a six-figure mistake, and you have a document that says so with reasoning attached. That’s a good outcome — it’s just not one most vendors are willing to sell you.
No, and there’s no clause anywhere that suggests it. If the report leads to work, we’d like to do it. If you take it to your internal team or another vendor, the report is written to be useful to them too.
For a single system, usually yes — reading code for structure and risk is a different job from rewriting it, and modern tooling covers ground fast. For a portfolio of several applications, it isn’t, and we’ll tell you that on the first call rather than after you’ve paid.
Chișinău, Moldova — between Romania and Ukraine, an EU candidate country with about 26,000 IT specialists. We work a shifted schedule that overlaps 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM US Eastern.
Moldova is not at war and is not a party to the conflict. We’ve had no conflict-related interruptions and can share our continuity plan before you sign anything — it’s a reasonable thing to want to see.
No. We have written security policies, role-based access control and documented offboarding, and we’ll share them. If SOC 2 is a hard requirement for a two-week read-only engagement, we’re probably not the right fit, and we’d rather say that now.
You do, outright. Mutual NDA signed before you send us anything, and we don’t reference your system publicly without written permission.
We’ll tell you whether this is something we can read and what it would cost — or that it isn’t, and where to look instead. That happens often enough to be worth mentioning.
Book a 20-minute call