Scale confidently with solid foundations. We harden live systems, fix flaky tests, and eliminate the 3am alerts.
Your app is live. Users depend on it. But something's not quite right. Maybe deployments feel like Russian roulette. Maybe there's that one flaky test everyone ignores. Maybe you're waking up to alerts at 3am more often than you'd like.
Production readiness isn't about building new features—it's about making what you have actually work. Reliably. Predictably. Without the constant anxiety.
The symptoms we see
When founders come to us for production readiness help, it usually starts with one of these:
Sound familiar? You're not alone. These problems are incredibly common—and they're all fixable.
What we actually do
Production readiness work varies based on what's broken, but here's the typical scope:
1. Observability & Monitoring
You can't fix what you can't see. We set up proper instrumentation so when something breaks, you know exactly where and why.
2. Error Handling That Actually Works
Generic try/catch isn't error handling—it's error hiding. Proper error handling means knowing exactly what went wrong and responding appropriately.
3. CI/CD That Doesn't Lie
A green build should mean the code is actually ready. Every push goes through the same gauntlet—no shortcuts, no "it worked on my machine."
4. Database Reliability
Connection pooling, query optimization, and proper migrations. The database is usually where production issues hide.
About "technical debt"
Technical debt is often used as an excuse for bad code. But real tech debt is intentional—shortcuts taken knowingly to ship faster, with a plan to fix later. What most teams have is accidental complexity from inexperience or changing requirements. We don't judge. We just fix it.
The process
We follow a structured approach to avoid making things worse:
What you get
At the end of a production readiness engagement, you'll have:
Reliable deployments — CI/CD that catches problems before they hit production
Proper monitoring — Dashboards, alerts, and traces that show what's actually happening
Error handling — Structured errors, proper logging, no more mystery crashes
Documentation — Runbooks for common issues, architecture diagrams, onboarding guides
Confidence — The ability to ship changes without holding your breath
This isn't a rewrite
We're not going to suggest throwing everything away and starting over. That's almost never the right call. Instead, we surgically fix the problems that matter most while preserving what works.
Think of it as renovation, not demolition.
Pricing
Fixed-scope engagements. We assess, quote, and deliver—no runaway costs.
Essential Hardening
For systems that work but need critical fixes before scaling or taking on more users.
Most engagements run 4-6 weeks. Week one is audit and planning, weeks two through five are implementation, and the final week is documentation and handoff. The exact timeline depends on the size and complexity of your system.
Yes, but with appropriate safeguards. We'll need read access to logs, metrics, and databases for analysis. For making changes, we work through your existing deployment pipeline and never push directly to production. We're happy to sign NDAs and work within your security requirements.
That's more common than you'd think. We'll start by adding tests to the most critical paths first—the code that handles payments, user data, and core business logic. We're not aiming for 100% coverage everywhere, just enough to make changes safely.
We work best when we can collaborate with your team. We'll do code reviews together, explain our changes, and document everything so your team can maintain it going forward. Knowledge transfer is part of the engagement.
You'll have documentation, runbooks, and a team that understands the changes we made. If you want ongoing support, we offer Engineering Support retainers. But there's no lock-in—everything we build is yours.
We use a risk/effort matrix. Critical security issues and data integrity problems come first. Then we tackle things that affect reliability and user experience. Low-risk, high-effort items go to the backlog. We'll review the prioritization with you before starting work.