Legacy System Rescue

Your legacy system has been running your business for years — possibly decades. It handles payroll, inventory, customer records, or production workflows that your entire operation depends on. And somewhere along the way, the original developer left, retired, or stopped answering the phone. The documentation never existed. And every time something breaks, there's no one left who knows how to fix it.

That's the situation we were built for.

What Legacy System Rescue Actually Means

Most developers, when confronted with a legacy codebase, do one of two things: they walk away, or they propose a full rewrite. Walking away helps no one. And a full rewrite — built by people who never fully understood the original system — tends to repeat the same mistakes at five times the cost.

We do something different. We read the code.

That sounds obvious, but it isn't common practice. Reading old FoxPro code, or undocumented Classic ASP, or a VB6 application with no comments is genuinely hard work. It requires patience, pattern recognition, and deep familiarity with how software was architected in the 1990s and early 2000s. We have 26 years of that familiarity. It is, frankly, our competitive advantage.

Our Process

Every legacy rescue engagement begins with a technical assessment. We spend two to three days reading your codebase, tracing the data flow, mapping the business logic, and documenting what we find. We produce a written report — not a slide deck, a written report — covering what's broken, what's at risk, what's working, and exactly what it would take to fix it.

That report is yours to keep regardless of whether you proceed with us. It has standalone value. Most of our clients have never seen a clear picture of their own system before that point.

Once we've completed the assessment, we prioritize fixes by business impact. Production-critical bugs that can take the system down come first. Then performance bottlenecks that are slowing your team down. Then security vulnerabilities — old systems frequently have SQL injection risks, unpatched authentication issues, and cleartext password storage that most people don't know about. Then we document everything we touch, so your team isn't permanently dependent on us.

What We Work On

We specialize in systems that other developers will not touch:

.NET Framework and WebForms — Applications built on .NET Framework 1.x through 4.8, using WebForms, UpdatePanels, and the older Web API patterns. We can stabilize these, fix bugs, optimize performance, and extend functionality without requiring a migration to .NET Core or .NET 9.

Classic ASP — ASP 3.0 applications with VBScript or JScript, typically running on IIS. We can debug, extend, and stabilize these systems, or migrate them to ASP.NET Core MVC.

VB6 — Visual Basic 6 desktop applications, often connected to Access databases or SQL Server via ADO. We can fix bugs, add features, and migrate to modern .NET.

Access and dBase — Microsoft Access applications with complex VBA macros, linked tables, and legacy report formats. dBase and Clipper systems with DBF-based data stores.

FoxPro and Visual FoxPro — FoxPro 2.5 through Visual FoxPro 9. DBF tables, CDX indexes, FPT memos, and the entire FoxPro runtime environment. We can fix production bugs, build integrations, extend reports, and migrate these systems to modern platforms when the time is right.

The Difference Between Us and Everyone Else

We find the 1% that's broken, instead of rebuilding the 99% that works. We don't sell you what's fashionable — we fix what's failing. We document everything we touch so your team isn't dependent on us forever. And we train your internal staff when it's relevant, because a rescue that leaves you just as dependent as before isn't really a rescue.

Investment

Legacy System Rescue engagements start with a $2,500 technical assessment. This gives you a written analysis of your system, a prioritized fix list, and a realistic effort and cost estimate — with no obligation to proceed further. Ongoing rescue work starts at $15,000 and scales with the scope of the system.