Andrew here, week 6.
Pet Planet, a multi-warehouse franchise pet retailer, got a quote to build a custom inventory system. $250,000, ten months. We built theirs in about three.
I want to be careful here, because sometimes a rebuild is genuinely the right call. Some codebases really are past saving. But "we need to rip it out and start from scratch" is also the most profitable sentence an agency can say to you, and that is exactly why you hear it so often.
Look at the incentive behind it. A ten-month rebuild is ten months of locked-in retainer, a brand-new scope nobody can hold against the old one, and a client who cannot switch horses in the middle. The mess in your codebase is not their problem to explain to you. It is their product to sell you.
Most of the time the honest fix is smaller and far less glamorous. Darn Tough came to us with a mobile store so slow it scored a 5 out of 100 on Google's speed test. The plan on the table was a full rebuild. We got it to 75 and passing every Core Web Vital without tearing the store down. It was a repair, not a demolition. Repairs don't bill like demolitions, which is precisely why the demolition gets quoted first.
We have gotten a scoping call wrong before, under-quoted a job that needed more surgery than we thought, and ate the difference. That's the trade when you quote the work instead of the calendar. It also means we have no reason to inflate one.
So before you sign a rebuild, ask one question: what specifically breaks if we fix this in place instead? If the answer is a real, concrete list of technical reasons, listen closely. If the answer is vague and the timeline is suspiciously round, ten months, a quarter-million, you are looking at a billing event wearing an engineering costume.
If you're holding a rebuild quote right now, book a Sprint Diagnostic with Jeremy. He was Shopify's fourth employee. He'll tell you in one call whether you need a rebuild or a repair, even when the honest answer sends you back to your current agency. Book a Sprint Diagnostic with Jeremy →
— Andrew
P.S. Pet Planet's system went live in a month and has been running since. The ten-month clock never even started ticking.