Legacy system assessment

You depend on a system that nobody is confident about any more. Maybe the developer who built it has retired, or the company that sold it has stopped answering. Maybe the documentation describes a version from years ago, or there's a server nobody wants to restart. The business has outgrown it, but replacing it feels like a leap in the dark.

Old or recent makes no difference. A VB6 application from 2004 and a React app from 2021 whose agency stopped replying are the same problem: your business runs on it and can't move it forward.

The assessment is the first step. It's also the last one you commit to before you know what the options cost.

It starts with a free hour, online or by phone. We go through what the system does, what's wrong with it and what you want from it. From that we size the assessment and give you an exact price. Nothing is paid until you say yes.

Then we spend a few days inside the system. We sit with the people who use it and watch the work flow through it. We read the code and whatever documentation exists. We look at the data, the hosting, the integrations, and the spreadsheets that have grown up around it. On-site when the system needs it, remote when it doesn't.

The person doing this is the person you spoke to on the consultation. If a system needs more hands, we bring them in, working to the same lead.

Four things.

• What the system does, written down in one place. You know your system. The report puts that knowledge on paper: the processes it runs, the data it holds, what depends on it and what it depends on. From then on it doesn't live only in the heads of the people who've been there longest.
• Where the risks are, and which ones matter. An operating system out of support, a backup nobody has tested lately, a licence that expires next year, a password only one person holds. Each one rated: urgent, or theoretical.
• Where AI would pay back. Reading paperwork into the system, drafting replies, answering questions from your own data. And where it wouldn't, so you don't spend money on hype.
• Costed options. Stabilise and extend what you have, modernise it in stages, or replace it. Each with a fixed price and a recommended order of work.

The report is yours. Take it to us, another developer, or nobody.

Most systems we look at are sound and neglected, which is a different thing from broken. The right answer is often to stabilise what's there and extend it: modern screens over the same data, an API so it can talk to the tools you've bought since, AI where it pays for itself.

Sometimes it's a staged rebuild, with the new system growing alongside the old one, screen by screen, sharing the same data, so your team keeps working throughout.

And sometimes the answer is to leave it alone and put the money elsewhere. If that's what the evidence says, that's what the report says.

Nothing happens to it during the assessment. We read; we don't change. What we do look at is how it's structured, how clean it is, and how it would move if it had to.

When work does follow, it never touches your live data until it has proven itself somewhere else. We build and test against a copy in a test environment, then run it in staging alongside the live system, migrating, checking and reconciling the data there first. Only when the tests have shown it's safe does anything connect to live, and the old system stays available as a fallback until you're confident.

From £395 + VAT, sized on the consultation, with an exact price before you commit. A single-user Access database and a twenty-year-old order processing system with forty users aren't the same job, so the price is set once we know which you have. It's payable in advance. The consultation is free.

Everything after that is priced by the report: a fixed price for each option, so an overrun is our risk rather than yours. Payment terms, what's included and what isn't are on the pricing page.

A few days inside your system, then the report. The scope is set on the consultation, so you know before it starts how much of your team's time it needs. Most of that time is theirs, because they're the ones who use it.

Quoting an unseen system is a guess, and guesses get paid for later. A developer who prices a rewrite from a phone call has priced what they imagine your system to be. The business rules inside an old system are worth more than the technology around them, and they're the first thing a rewrite loses when nobody has mapped them.

Doing nothing has dates attached. Windows Server 2016 support ends in January 2027. SQL Server 2016 security updates ended in July 2026 for most licence holders. The analogue phone lines some systems still dial, fax or alert over go in January 2027. A system that has run for years without incident can become a problem on a date in the calendar.

Understand first. Then stabilise. Then modernise one safe step at a time.

Marc Allington leads every assessment. He has built business systems in VB, Access, SQL Server and .NET as well as on the web, in the cloud and with AI, so an old system is familiar ground. Everything we build afterwards runs on open, widely used technology, in your own accounts, with full source code and ownership transferring to you on final payment.