Built fast. Now it needs to be trusted.
AI app builders and small teams can get a product to a working demo remarkably quickly. Then real users arrive, and the gaps show up: edits that don’t save, invitations that fail, uploads that vanish, and nobody quite sure whether one customer can see another’s data.
You usually don’t need a rebuild. You need a senior engineer to find what is actually wrong, fix it at the root, and hand you a codebase and deployment you own.
The Stabilization Assessment
A fixed-fee senior technical review that ends with a clear, prioritized plan — every fix individually priced, so you decide what to fix, in what order, and what to spend.
What we review
- Data access and security. Database roles, row-level security, over-broad grants, unprotected tables, and whether one customer’s data can leak to another.
- Broken flows. Sign-up, invitations, account claiming, and payments traced end to end for failure modes, race conditions, and retries that double up.
- Lost data. Root cause for edits, uploads, and profile data that don’t persist — autosave, optimistic updates, and conflicting writes.
- Visibility. Whether you can actually see how beta users are using the product, and what to instrument.
- Deployment and hand-off. A portable, documented path to run the app without lock-in to the tool it was built in.
What you get
- A findings report with severity and business impact for each area.
- A prioritized fix list — each item in plain language, with a fixed price and expected turnaround.
- A focused security and access-control summary.
- Deployment and hand-off recommendations.
- A 30–45 minute walkthrough call to go over the findings and answer questions.
Stacks we work with: React and other modern JavaScript front ends; Supabase, Firebase, and PostgreSQL back ends; Stripe, Dwolla, and Plaid payments — including apps started in AI builders such as Bolt or Lovable.
How it’s priced
- The assessment is a fixed fee, agreed before work starts. A tighter one-week option is available when you need answers fast.
- Each fix on your list carries its own fixed price, so you choose what to do and when.
- No obligation. The plan is yours to act on with us, with another team, or on your own.
The assessment is advisory: it tells you what to fix and what it will cost. It does not certify compliance.
Ongoing support
Once the app is stable, keep a senior engineer on call for upkeep. Plans are a fixed monthly fee, month-to-month with 30 days’ notice. Ask us for current pricing.
| What’s included | Core | Priority |
|---|---|---|
| Best for | Reactive maintenance on a budget | Proactive upkeep with faster response |
| Senior hours included each month | Up to 10 | Up to 22, with partial rollover |
| Critical issue response | Same business day | Within 2 business hours |
| Normal response | Next business day | Same business day |
| Reactive fixes | Included | Included |
| Proactive maintenance | As time allows | Monthly: dependency and platform updates, security-policy spot checks, error and uptime review, backup verification |
| Channels | Email or ticket | Email or ticket, plus shared Slack |
| Reporting | Monthly work summary | Monthly health report and work summary |
Both plans include a named senior engineer, security-patch alerts for your stack, and the hand-off documentation from your assessment. Coverage is business hours, Monday–Friday, Central time. Support starts from a stabilized codebase, so your hours go to upkeep rather than firefighting.
Why Hat Boy Software
We have done this on systems where the stakes were real. At Shovel Solutions, a hauling marketplace, our review found that about 1 of ~80 backend functions checked who was calling and that a payment retry could send a duplicate ACH transfer — then designed the fix so neither could happen again. Read the case study →
Ready to find out where you stand? Tell us about your app for a quote, or call (662) 626-0732.