What actually happens
Typically two to four weeks, depending on what you built and how fast you can answer questions. Here's the whole thing, start to finish.
- 1
Tell me what you've got
Fifteen free minutes on a call, or five questions online if you'd rather not talk to anyone yet. By the end of it I know what you built, what's live, and what is riding on it.
- 2
I look properly
This is the $750 report. I read the code, the database rules and the secrets myself, then tell you what is true about your app rather than what would be convenient for me to say, up to and including that you don't need me yet. It lands within 72 hours.
- 3
The accounts go in your name
GitHub, hosting, database, domain, secrets. Every one of them created under your login and your billing, so ownership is a fact about the setup rather than a promise from me.
- 4
Your app moves across
I migrate what you built instead of rebuilding it, then verify the result against a checklist the two of us agree on before anything moves. You know what finished looks like in advance.
- 5
The gaps get closed
Database access rules written and tested, every key and secret rotated, and staging separated from production so you can try a change before your customers meet it.
- 6
You learn to drive it
Claude Code set up on your own codebase, plus up to four working sessions in it with me. You finish able to keep building without me, which is the whole point of the exercise.
Six things in your name
None of it is licensed to you or managed on your behalf. Every account is created in your name, which means you could fire me tomorrow and lose nothing at all.
Three paths, honestly compared
Most founders belong in the middle column. If you are not one of them you will hear that from me, including when staying exactly where you are is the right call for now.
| Criteria | Current State Lovable/Replit + Supabase | Tier 1–2 Outcome GitHub + CI/CD + Supabase | Tier 3 Outcome AWS ECS + Terraform |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who controls it | The platform does. You get limited visibility into what runs where, and changing any of it means asking them. | You do. Your GitHub, your Supabase project, your hosting account, your domain. | You do, described in code. Every resource versioned in Terraform and auditable. |
| Deploying a change | Click to deploy through the platform. Reproducing a failure locally is hard, and working out why it happened is harder. | Pull request, automated checks, staging, then production. Repeatable, and you can watch it happen. | Container images and blue/green releases. More machinery than most early products need. |
| Monthly cost | Plans start around $20–25/mo, but metered AI credits dominate the bill and vary enormously from project to project. A month of heavy building looks nothing like a quiet one. | Supabase Pro $25, hosting at cost, CI usually free. Commonly $50–150/mo, plus whatever AI tooling you choose. | A higher floor, roughly $200–500/mo before traffic, but predictable and controllable as it grows with you. |
| Testing before it's live | Often no separation at all, which means the same configuration serves your experiments and your customers. | Separate development, staging and production, each with their own secrets and their own data. | Separate accounts or networks per environment. The standard for regulated work. |
| Security | Rests entirely on platform defaults and on whether anybody thought to check them. Access rules are frequently never configured at all. | Access rules written and tested, secrets stored properly, dependencies tracked. A materially stronger baseline. | Network segmentation, managed secrets, full audit logging. Necessary for enterprise buyers, overkill before that. |
| How you build from here | Tied to the platform's editor and its prompting model. Your workflow is theirs. | Claude Code on a clean repository, with test and review habits that hold as the codebase grows. | The same workflow, extended to the infrastructure itself. |
| When this is right | Getting an idea to a working prototype. Nothing else on this table gets you there faster. | You have real users, or you're about to. This is where most founders should be. | Significant traffic, enterprise security requirements, or multi-region reliability. Rarely early. |
What to expect from me
Building this way was the right call and you should carry on doing it. These tools got you a working product faster than hiring could have. What they leave behind is the engineering underneath, and that is the part I do.
Most of what you've made is fine and it moves across intact. Where a piece of the code really does need rewriting, you'll hear it plainly and with a price attached, instead of discovering it halfway through.
The walkthrough and the Claude Code sessions carry most of the value in this engagement. Being able to ship your own changes afterwards is what stops you needing me again in six months.
Plenty of apps are in better shape than their owners fear. When yours turns out to be one of them, the report says so and your $750 goes back. That costs me a sale and buys something I would rather have.
See where your app sits today
Fifteen minutes with the engineer who would do the work, and a straight read on what you have built. There is no deck and no pitch waiting at the end of it.