A senior developer reads your codebase, tells you what is actually there, and gives you a costed plan to fix it or move it.
Plenty of good products now start on a vibe-coding platform such as Lovable, Base44, or Bubble. That is a sensible way to prove an idea. The trouble starts later, when the platform will not do the next thing you need, or the hosting/ licensing bill outgrows the product.
The same conversation happens with older codebases. The basic app works, nobody wants to touch it, maintenance is messy, and you need to know whether to refactor it, rewrite it, or leave it alone. AI-accelerated development has genuinely changed the answer to that question over the last two years.
Either way, the first step is the same. Someone senior reads the code and tells you the truth about it, in writing, with numbers attached.
Almost every audit we run starts from one of these three situations. The work looks similar in each case. The recommendation at the end usually does not.
You started on Lovable, Base44, Bubble, or something similar, and it got you a working product faster than a traditional build would have. Then you tried to add a real permissions model, a second integration, or a feature the platform does not want to give you. Or the bill started growing faster than your usage. Both are normal, and both are a reason to look at what you actually own.
It runs, but nobody wants to touch it. The framework is old, there are no tests, and the developer who wrote it left years ago. You want to know whether to refactor it or rewrite it, and what AI-assisted development changes about that decision.
Deadlines slip and the explanations get vaguer. Before you spend more money, you want an independent read on whether the code is salvageable. Sometimes it is, and the real problem is scope or communication rather than engineering. We will tell you that too.
Not a script, and not a dashboard. We clone the repository and read it the way we would read our own. Static analysis and AI tooling run alongside that, because they are fast and they catch things people miss, but the judgement is human. Tools find issues. They do not tell you which ones matter to your roadmap.
We name what is wrong, say how much it actually matters, and put a number against what it costs to fix. Findings you can safely ignore get marked as such. A list of 400 warnings helps nobody.
A senior designer reviews the existing product against the flows users actually take. A migration is the natural moment to fix the things users have been complaining about, since the screens are being rebuilt anyway. This runs alongside the code audit or on its own.
Read-only collaborator access to GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket is normally all it takes to start. We do not need production credentials or customer data to audit a codebase, and we will not ask for them.
If your code is still inside a platform, getting it out is usually easier than people expect, and we will help. The exception is Bubble, and it is worth being straight about why.
Lovable syncs your project to a GitHub repository. Connect it, add us as a read-only collaborator, and we have everything we need. Extraction is rarely the hard part here. The audit usually focuses on what the generated code assumed: authentication, data access rules, and the shortcuts a prototype gets away with that a production app does not.
Base44 lets you export the generated code. If your team has not done it before, we will walk them through it on a call. Once it is in a repository we treat it like any other codebase.
This one comes with honest bad news. Bubble is genuinely no-code, and there is no source export that another team can pick up and run with. Moving off Bubble means rebuilding rather than porting. The audit becomes a specification exercise instead: we document what your Bubble app actually does, screen by screen and rule by rule, then cost the rebuild against it.
FlutterFlow exports a complete Flutter project, so the code comes across cleanly. We are official FlutterFlow experts, which makes this the best-trodden path on this list.
Read more on how we use FlutterFlowRepository access plus a short call with whoever understands the deployment process. If the code is not in version control yet, that is finding number one, and we will help you get it there before anything else.
The document is yours. Take it to your board, your investors, or another development agency. We would rather be judged on it than protected by it.
One page a non-technical stakeholder can read and act on, with an overall risk rating and the three things that matter most.
How the system is put together, and whether that structure survives the next year of the roadmap you have in mind.
Duplication, dead code, complexity, and naming. In practice this answers one question: how quickly can a new developer become productive here?
Secrets handling, authentication, authorisation, row-level access rules, and anything exposed to the client that should have stayed on the server.
Schema, relationships, indexes, and migration history, plus a clear view of what data would have to move and in what order.
Outdated packages, known vulnerabilities, and any licence that quietly constrains how you can sell or distribute the product.
Where it slows down today, and what it costs to run at ten times the current load. Platform pricing is often the reason people call us in the first place.
What test coverage exists, what the build and deploy process looks like, and what has to be in place before changes can ship safely.
What is genuinely portable, what is welded to the platform, and what it would take to separate the two.
Every finding, ranked by impact, with an effort estimate against each one so you can decide what to do now and what can wait.
Where a migration is on the table, two or three routes with a fixed-price estimate against each, including the option of staying put.
We walk you and your team through the findings, answer questions, and argue the trade-offs with you rather than at you.
We do not quote a migration before we have read the code. Anyone who does is guessing.
Stack, hosting, and what carries across unchanged. We recommend the simplest option that clears the constraint you actually hit, not the most interesting one.
Schema and records go first, so every feature that follows is built against real data rather than fixtures.
Each slice is tested and reviewed as it lands. You see working software throughout, not a six-month silence.
The old system stays live until the new one demonstrably matches it. Nobody flips a switch and hopes.
You get the repository, the deployment pipeline, and the documentation. You own the code at every step of this list.
The cost depends on the specific task and the complexity of the code that already exists. A ten-file prototype and a six-year-old enterprise system are not the same job, which is why we do not publish one number for this.
What we do instead: scope the work against your repository, estimate the hours it will take, and quote a fixed price before starting. You know the cost up front, and there is no open-ended meter running.
Pair the audit with one real piece of work. Fix a specific bug that has been bothering you, or add the one enhancement your users keep asking for. You get a document and a working improvement out of the same engagement, which makes the exercise worth doing even if you decide to stay exactly where you are.
Lovable (often written Loveable) syncs your project to GitHub, so the code is already exportable. Give us read-only access to the repository and we can start. The work is rarely about extraction. It is about what the generated code assumed: authentication, data access rules, structure, and test coverage that a prototype gets away with and a production app does not. We audit the repository first, then quote the migration as a fixed price.
Not in a form another development team can use. Bubble is genuinely no-code, so a move off it is a rebuild rather than a port. We handle that by turning the audit into a specification exercise: we document what your Bubble app does, screen by screen and rule by rule, then cost the rebuild against that document. You end up with a specification you own, which is useful whoever builds it.
We can. A senior developer reads your codebase and returns a written audit covering architecture, code quality, security, data model, dependencies, performance, and test coverage, with a prioritised list of what to fix and an effort estimate against each item. We have shipped over 120 apps in ten years, so the judgement comes from having built and maintained this kind of system, not from running a linter over it.
It depends on the task and the complexity of what already exists, so we do not publish a single number. A ten-file prototype and a six-year-old enterprise codebase are not the same job. We scope the audit against your repository, estimate the hours, and quote a fixed price before any work starts, so there is no open-ended meter running.
Yes. Base44 exports the generated code, so the migration starts from a real repository. We audit what comes out, tell you what is worth keeping, and quote the move to a stack you control. If your team has not run the export before, we will do it with them on a call.
It depends on how much of the existing behaviour is still correct. Refactoring preserves years of accumulated edge cases that nobody has written down. Rewriting throws those away, which is the real risk, not the code volume. What has changed is the cost side: AI-accelerated development has cut rewrite timelines enough that rewriting is now viable in cases where it was not three years ago. We cost both options and give you a recommendation with the reasoning attached.
Most take one to two weeks from repository access to the handover call. Larger or older codebases take longer. We tell you which one you have before we start, not halfway through.
Then we say so. Sometimes the code is in reasonable shape and the real problem is scope, communication, or expectations that were never written down. An honest answer is worth more to you than a migration you did not need, and worth more to us than one uncomfortable conversation.
No. Read-only access to the code repository is enough to run an audit. A schema dump or a redacted sample helps with the data-model review, but it is optional. We do not ask for production credentials or customer records.
Yes, and it is often worth doing at the same time. A senior designer reviews the existing product against the flows users actually take, which turns a migration into an opportunity to fix the things users have been complaining about. It runs alongside the code audit or on its own.
Send us the repository and we will tell you what is there, what it would cost to fix, and what it would cost to move. You get a fixed price before any work starts.
Lovable and Base44 and Bubble are registered trademarks of their respective owners. App Developer Studio is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Lovable and Base44 and Bubble. These platforms are named to describe migration work on apps our clients already built with them. We do not resell, license, or redistribute their software.
