Studios
For mid-sized businesses with applications that still work but no longer fit. Stuck on an aging framework, locked into on-prem when the rest of the stack is in the cloud, or built as a monolith when the team needs to move faster than one deploy can carry.
Older .NET, Java, PHP, or jQuery-era frontends. Security patches are getting harder to apply. New libraries don’t support the version you’re on. Every dependency upgrade triggers another rewrite of something else.
Server hardware aging. Backups manual. Scaling means buying more boxes and waiting for the IT vendor. The data the rest of your tools need lives behind a firewall nobody outside the office can reach.
One change to the billing logic redeploys the whole application. The team is afraid to touch anything because the blast radius of a small bug is the entire product. Release cadence has slowed to a crawl.
Modern engineers don’t want their resume to say jQuery and ASP.NET WebForms. The talent you can attract is shrinking. The talent you can retain costs more every year.
Modernization is rarely a clean rewrite. The right answer is usually to evolve the application piece by piece, replacing the parts that hurt while keeping the parts that work. We’ll tell you which pieces to move first.
“We don’t want to rewrite it. We want it to stop slowing us down.”
— CTO, MID-SIZED DISTRIBUTOR
Most legacy application modernization services get pitched as a clean rebuild. The team disappears for nine months, the budget triples, and the new version ships missing the workflows the old one quietly relied on. We don’t run that play. Four things change when you work with us.
Before we touch the code, we identify the one outcome the modernization should produce. Every architecture decision, every framework choice, every migration step aligns against it. The result is a roadmap you can defend at the board level, not a list of buzzwords.
A flat monthly rate gets you a senior US development team. Scale up or down as the modernization phase shifts. No hourly billing, no surprise invoices when a refactor turns out to be larger than expected.
When the application breaks mid-migration or a question comes up, you reach a senior developer who knows your codebase, in under sixty minutes*, during business hours. Not a ticket queue. Not a junior on rotation.
*In practice, the average is just a few minutes.
If, in the first sixty days, you decide we’re not the right partner, we refund your first month. As far as we know, no one else in this industry offers this. We do because we’ve never had to honor it.
Our application modernization and migration services run in three phases. From the first call to the moment the modernized architecture is carrying production load, each step has a clear scope, a clear price, and a clear way out if it isn’t working.
A thirty-minute working call. We diagnose what’s actually slowing the application down: the framework, the architecture, the deployment model, or something else entirely. If a contained refactor or a managed-platform migration solves it, we’ll point you in that direction instead of pitching a full modernization. You leave with a written assessment either way.
A scoped engagement to modernize the piece that hurts the most. We pick the module where the framework upgrade, the cloud migration, or the architecture split delivers the highest immediate payoff, ship it, and prove the approach. The rest of the application keeps running on the existing stack while we work. If at any point in the first sixty days you decide we’re not a fit, we refund your first month.
If you’re happy with the first module, the engagement continues under the same monthly subscription. We modernize the rest of the application module by module, on the cadence the business can absorb. The old architecture runs alongside the new one until every workflow has moved, with no operational downtime. You own the modernized code from day one.
Each of these clients had an application that worked but had stopped serving them. We modernized what no longer fit, one piece at a time, with no operational downtime.
For fifteen years Misty tried to replace SASS's 1990s Visual Basic system. Nothing fit. When we opened the database, it hadn’t been backed up in years. We secured forty years of membership data first, then replaced the system in 11 months with no downtime. Eighteen days after launch, the team said they had 30% of their day back.
“They made us feel valued and respected, with the intention of building a lasting partnership rather than just collecting a paycheck.”
Their core operations ran on a Visual FoxPro database older than the developers maintaining it. We rebuilt it on a modern stack, then migrated the business one feature at a time so daily operations never paused. The legacy application is being retired piece by piece.
Read the full case study →Amy was running her clinic on fifteen different off-the-shelf programs that were never built to work together. Daily auditing. Constant data entry. We replaced all of them with one application designed around her actual workflow.
“Every part of this project has been smooth, with clear communication and frequent check-ins throughout.”
Yes. Our cloud application modernization services cover all three major providers. The right destination depends on what the rest of your stack already uses and what your team can operate. We’ll tell you on the assessment call whether a lift-and-shift, a re-platform, or a partial refactor is the right move. AWS application modernization services tend to fit teams already running other workloads on AWS; Azure and GCP fit the same pattern for their respective ecosystems. Some applications belong fully in the cloud. Some are better served by a hybrid setup. Some shouldn’t move at all.
The work breaks into three layers. First, the application itself: the framework gets upgraded, the code gets cleaned of the patterns that won’t survive a cloud environment (hard-coded filesystem paths, local-only assumptions, single-server scheduling). Second, the data: the database moves to a managed cloud service, and we run the legacy and cloud databases side by side until the cutover is provably safe. Third, the deployment: the application moves from a manual server install to an automated cloud deployment pipeline. We sequence these so the business keeps running on the legacy stack the whole time. The cloud version takes over module by module, not all at once.
Most clients see the first module modernized in four to six weeks. Full modernization typically runs nine to eighteen months depending on the size of the application. We work module by module so the business sees value early and never has to flip a switch on a single big-bang launch day.
Yes. The existing application stays live until the modernized version has fully replaced it. We migrate one module at a time and run them side by side until the team is confident in the new version. No operational downtime and no go-live weekend where everything breaks at once.
As with everything, the devil is in the details. However, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with monoliths. We would start by evaluating where the assumptions around re-architecting come from and seeing their stand up under scrutiny. If they do, we can build a service-oriented architecture. If they don't, it's still possible we can solve the pains that say "services" from another angle.
Framework upgrades almost never work as a single-shot conversion. We typically run the old framework and the new framework side by side. New modules ship on the new framework. Existing modules get ported as their roadmap warrants. The team gets the benefits of the modern framework immediately without staking the whole application on one upgrade weekend.
That’s a different engagement than modernization. We’ll tell you on the assessment call if Continuous Care is what your situation actually needs. Sometimes the right move is a small refactor and a senior team to keep things running, not a modernization project. We won’t pitch you modernization if Continuous Care is the answer.
A thirty-minute working session. We listen to what the application does, where the team is feeling friction, and what the modernization is supposed to enable.
If modernization is the right move, we’ll tell you. If a contained refactor, a managed-platform migration, or Continuous Care solves it instead, we’ll tell you that too, even if it’s not us.
A written assessment, including our honest recommendation and (if modernization is the right move) the migration plan. Free to keep, whether or not we work together.