Legacy takeover · Member platform
Rebuilt without the source code.
A national members' organisation, about 4,000 users a day, operated by a staff of ten. The previous developer would not release the code.
The situation
Natshoot is the member management platform for a national members' organisation, and it is the largest system on this page. About 4,000 users a day. More than 20,000 member activities in a month. Ten staff running the whole of it across endorsements, activities, scores, and course dedicated status, on a 24 hour turnaround. The organisation's reputation rests on member service, which in practice means a small team absorbing a large volume without the volume ever showing.
We inherited the database. We did not inherit the source code, because the previous developer refused to release it.
There was a price on leaving. The developer offered to sell the source code, with a further fee on top to hand over the environment. Together it came to almost as much as rebuilding the platform from scratch would, to own what the organisation had already paid to have built, and not one of the monthly bills would have changed.
What we did
We rebuilt the platform from scratch around the inherited data, on Azure with .NET Core and React. Three developers, twelve months, the same three from the first day to the last.
Without source code, the running system is the only specification that exists. Parts of the platform had to be reverse engineered from behaviour: watch what it does, work out the rule underneath, prove the rule, rebuild it. That is slow and it is entirely survivable, which is worth saying plainly. A vendor withholding your code does not trap you. It only makes leaving more expensive.
The rest was the ordinary difficulty of a large takeover. Every inherited system carries undocumented rules and the particular way some feature happened to work, and none of that appears in a scope document. It surfaces sprint by sprint, and catching it takes the client testing and answering as much as it takes us building. Twelve months on a system this size is what that honesty costs.
Where it landed
Hosting came down 58%. Support and maintenance came down 73%. Between them, the cost of keeping the platform running every month fell by more than two thirds.
The rebuild came to 9% more than the developer's price for the old code, and it paid for itself inside eighteen months on the savings alone. The difference is where the money goes now. Instead of paying to keep a system alive, they spend it on building, which is what keeps them competitive in their market.
The organisation owns the code outright, in its own accounts and its own cloud subscription, with documentation written for whoever reads it next rather than for us. A platform at this scale, built and then run, maps to an Embedded plan at $9,500 a month.
Your system could be the next one.
Natshoot started as somebody else's code, with the source withheld. It still started with the audit.
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