How We Rescued a SaaS Product After a Failed Agency Handoff

The scenario below is a composite case study built from patterns Symilars sees repeatedly across takeover engagements. It is not a single real, named client, and none of the figures below should be read as verified statistics about one company. We're presenting it this way because the pattern itself is the useful part: if you're currently staring at a codebase you didn't build, wondering whether it can even be saved, the shape of this story is more instructive than any one company's numbers would be.

The Situation

The client was a Series A logistics SaaS platform — a route-planning and fleet-visibility tool sold to mid-market shipping and delivery operators. The founding team had good product instincts and a growing pipeline of enterprise leads, but the software behind the pitch deck had been built over 14 months by an outsourced agency that had, by the time Symilars got the call, gone quiet.

The warning signs matched almost exactly what we describe in How to Take Over a Failed or Abandoned Software Project: sprint updates that had shrunk from detailed Loom walkthroughs to one-line Slack messages, then to nothing; a promised "v2 dashboard" that had been "almost done" for two release cycles in a row; and a CTO-less founding team with no one in-house who could confidently say what was actually deployed in production versus what only existed in a staging branch.

The founders didn't have a smoking gun. They had a feeling — the kind of slow-dawning unease that comes from three missed check-ins and a support inbox filling up with bug reports the agency wasn't triaging. They reached out not because they were certain the project was abandoned, but because they needed someone to tell them, honestly, how bad it actually was.

What the Audit Found

Before quoting anything, we ran a structured audit against the codebase, the infrastructure, and the deployment pipeline — the same four-step process outlined in our takeover guide. What came back was a fairly typical mix of blocking issues, high-risk debt, and cosmetic noise.

Blocking issues:

• Database credentials and a third-party mapping API key committed directly into the repository's version history, both still live
• No automated backups configured on the production database — a manual export existed, six weeks stale
• A critical route-optimization job that silently failed under specific payload sizes, with no alerting, so failures only surfaced when a customer complained

High-risk technical debt:

• Effectively zero automated test coverage — a handful of scaffolded test files with no real assertions inside them
• A monolithic API layer where business logic, database queries, and request handling were tangled together in the same functions, making any change to one feature risk breaking two unrelated ones
• Authentication and authorization logic duplicated across multiple endpoints instead of centralized, with at least one route missing an ownership check entirely
• Dependencies roughly two years out of date, several with published security advisories

Cosmetic or low-priority debt:

• Inconsistent naming conventions and formatting across files clearly written by different contractors over time
• Dead code from at least one abandoned feature branch that had been merged into main

None of this was unusual in isolation. What made it serious was the combination: a live security exposure, no safety net of tests to catch regressions, and no reliable backup if something went wrong while fixing any of it. The findings report we handed back to the founders was blunt about that ordering — some of it needed to be fixed that week, and the rest could wait.

The Plan: Stabilize Before You Build

The founders' instinct, understandably, was to ask us to just finish the v2 dashboard the previous agency had promised. We pushed back on sequencing, not scope. Building new features on top of unpatched security holes and an untested core would have meant inheriting the same fragility that got them here, just with our name on it.

We proposed a three-phase plan instead of one large estimate, which is the approach we recommend in any takeover:

1. Stabilization (weeks 1–3): Rotate every exposed credential, remove secrets from version history, restore automated backups, and fix the silently failing route job. No new features — just closing the holes that could sink the product overnight.
2. Foundation rebuild (weeks 4–9): Build a real test suite around the highest-traffic paths (route calculation, billing, and account access), refactor the authorization logic into one centralized layer, and untangle the worst of the monolithic API code enough to make future changes safe.
3. Resume feature development (week 10 onward): Pick the v2 dashboard back up, now on top of code the team could actually reason about and change without holding its breath.

We gave the founders a written estimate for phase one only, with rough ranges for phases two and three that we committed to firming up once phase one's findings were confirmed. That let them make a real go/no-go decision with a small, bounded number instead of signing off on months of unknowns up front.

The Work

Phase one moved fast because it had to. Every credential in the repository's history was rotated within the first week, the leaked API key was revoked and replaced, and a proper automated backup schedule was wired into the infrastructure with alerting if a backup run failed. The silent job failure turned out to be a straightforward unhandled exception on payloads above a certain route-stop count — a two-day fix once someone actually went looking for it, which nobody at the previous agency apparently had.

Phase two was the slower, less glamorous work that actually determines whether a rescue holds. Rather than attempting a full rewrite — which we generally advise against unless a codebase is truly beyond repair — the team wrote characterization tests against the existing behavior of the route-calculation and billing modules first, so that any refactoring afterward had something to check against. Only then did the authorization logic get consolidated into a single middleware layer, closing the missing ownership check along the way. The API layer was split incrementally, module by module, rather than in one large disruptive pass, specifically so the product stayed shippable the entire time. Dependency upgrades were batched and tested in isolation rather than done as one giant version bump, which surfaced two breaking changes that would have been far harder to trace if they'd been rolled in together with everything else.

By the end of phase two, roughly 60% of the core request paths had meaningful automated test coverage — not full coverage, which wasn't the goal, but enough that a change to the billing logic no longer required someone to manually click through the app and hope nothing else broke.

Phase three looked almost boring by comparison, which was the point. The v2 dashboard that had stalled for two release cycles under the previous agency shipped in about five weeks, on a codebase the team could now move through with some confidence instead of dread.

The Outcome

Framed qualitatively rather than with invented precision: the platform went from an unpatched security exposure and no reliable backup to a stabilized, tested foundation within roughly three weeks, and from stabilization to resumed normal feature velocity within about ten weeks total. The founders regained the ability to answer a basic question they hadn't been able to answer before — "what's actually live in production right now" — and stopped needing to personally worry about whether the next deploy would take down billing.

Just as importantly, the enterprise pipeline that had been stalling on "can you show us your security practices" questions started moving again, because there were finally real answers to give.

What This Means for You

If you're reading this because your own situation rhymes with the one described here, a few things are worth taking away. First, vague unease about your agency's responsiveness is a legitimate reason to get a second opinion — you don't need proof of abandonment to justify an audit. Second, a real audit produces a tiered list of problems, not a single verdict of "it's fine" or "burn it down"; most inherited codebases are salvageable, and most of what looks catastrophic on day one turns out to be a manageable, sequenced list once someone actually reads the code. Third, resist the urge to jump straight back into feature work before the ground underneath it is stable — it feels slower in week one and is almost always faster by week ten.

The pattern in this case study — quiet decline, an honest audit, a phased stabilization plan, and a return to normal velocity — is the same one we walk through in more depth in How to Take Over a Failed or Abandoned Software Project, including the specific audit checklist, access-transfer steps, and contract protections worth putting in place so it doesn't happen again.