The assessment, without the retainer
The Software Health and Continuity Review is the same deliverable as the Takeover Assessment, written at full report depth, for people who do not want an ongoing relationship. Typical reasons:
- You are preparing to sell a business and want to know what a buyer will find in the software.
- You are buying a business and want to know what you are inheriting.
- You want a second opinion on software you rely on, from someone who is not selling you the next rebuild.
- A large customer, an investor or a lender has asked how the software is looked after.
What every tier covers
Every review, at every tier, looks at the same things:
- Frameworks, runtimes and dependencies that are past end of life or out of date.
- Code quality and how easy it would be for a new developer to work in it.
- Hosting: where it runs, who owns the account, what it costs and whether it is oversized.
- Backups and recovery, with restore evidence where we were able to test one.
- Documentation and knowledge gaps: what lives only in someone's head.
- Vendor and single-person dependency.
- Licensing and hosting cost waste.
- What would break if the original vendor stayed gone.
- A modernization and AI opportunity map.
The review ends with a priced list of fixes, each with the evidence behind it. Automated scanner output, where we run it, is attached as an appendix labeled "tooling findings" so nobody mistakes it for anything more.
Pricing
| Tier | Scope | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Essentials | Under 25,000 lines of custom code, common stack | $4,800 |
| Standard | 25,000 to 150,000 lines of custom code | $9,500 |
| Deep | 150,000 to 300,000 lines of custom code; larger systems are quoted | $26,000 |
Deep is typically bought with a reason, such as a letter of intent, a large customer requirement or the loss of a vendor. Prices are in USD with a fixed scope.
Add-ons and options
| Option | Price |
|---|---|
| Sell-Side Readiness: continuity, maintainability and end-of-life findings for a seller, a priced fix list, a 100-day plan and a broker-ready summary | $5,000 as an add-on, or $9,000 stand-alone (up to 75,000 lines) |
| Buyer diligence: license flags, intellectual property and single-person dependency, and a cost estimate | +$4,000 as an add-on, or $9,000 stand-alone |
| No-LLM option: fully manual, no client code to any AI model | +50% of the tier price |
| Retest: verify the fixes were done | $1,500, and free within 60 days if we did the fix |
Sell-Side Readiness covers continuity and maintainability only. Buyer diligence flags licensing questions for your attorney to conclude on. We do not give legal conclusions.
Credit
50% of a stand-alone review fee is credited against remediation work or a retainer if you sign within 90 days of the report. That is $2,400 on Essentials, $4,750 on Standard and up to $10,000 on Deep. The credit is non-cash, non-refundable and non-transferable.
How the review is delivered
A written report in PDF and JSON, plus a 45 to 60 minute readout. If you prefer, the engagement can run through your counsel, and we can deliver verbally only. Your code is deleted from our systems within 30 days of the final report unless you move to a retainer. The work is AI-assisted and human-reviewed, and we describe exactly how in the method section of the report.
See the layout of a report on What You Get.
Honest limits
Findings are as of the stated date. This is not a guarantee, a security assessment or a penetration test.
A review reflects what we could read and run at the time. It does not predict the future, and it does not replace advice from your attorney, accountant or a specialist firm. We say plainly where we could not see something. We do not offer security assessments or security testing, and we will refer you to a firm that does.
Who asks for this
Owners of established companies who realize their business runs on software nobody understands. Founders getting ready to sell. Acquirers doing homework before closing. Technology leaders who want an outside, fixed-price view before deciding between maintaining and rebuilding. You may also want to read the post on what a takeover covers.
Tell us about your software and which situation you are in. We will recommend a tier by email and confirm the price before anything starts.
