[ Is this you? ]
Maybe they retired, maybe they moved on, maybe the last invoice ended badly. Either way the system still runs the business, nobody else has ever opened it, and every question about it now has the same answer: ask the person who is not here.
Fixed scope · 1–5 days · a report you own whether or not you continue.
How it is deployed, where the backups go, which password unlocks what — it lived in their head, and their head is no longer on your payroll.
Systems built by one person are often never put in source control. The version on the server is the version, and the server is the risk.
Every developer you ask will hedge, because the first thing they would have to do is find out what they are inheriting. That is a job, and it has a price — which is what the health check is.
The same four steps as every rescue, and the first two matter most here: a copy of everything, before anyone who is not the original developer touches it.
We ask for the keys that let us look, not touch. Nothing on a running system is changed in week one.
Code, database, server configuration — a snapshot you keep, so there is always a way back.
Every server, repository, database and integration the business runs on, including the ones nobody remembered.
What is fragile, what is urgent and what it costs to fix, in plain language, with the evidence beside each finding.
A system that lost its developer is usually sound underneath and starved of care: no backup ever tested, nothing written down, a few things quietly broken. Rescue puts those back, and the health check says exactly which.
We stop the bleeding: recover source code and access, fix the failures that wake you up at night, close the security holes, and put backups, monitoring and documentation in place. The system you have, made dependable.
The shipping platform had no source control and one copy of the code, on the production server. The rescue started by writing down what the system did — before anything else.
A shipping platform, rescued
Thirty minutes, no commitment. If a health check is the right next step, it is from $500, one to five days, and the report is yours whether or not you continue.