Platform audit and rescue
Told a client their nearly finished platform could not safely take a payment yet.
- Client
- Client project
- Year
- 2026
- Status
- Audit delivered
- My role
- Technical audit and remediation plan
Problem
A client inherited a booking platform across four applications and had been told it was nearly finished. They wanted to switch on real payments. Nobody had read the whole thing.
Architecture
- 01
Read all four applications
Customer web app, admin panel, vendor panel and the Express API, roughly sixty-one thousand lines of TypeScript, gone through rather than sampled.
- 02
Map it against the spec
One hundred and eighty-four endpoints, thirty-one tables and fourteen migrations, checked feature by feature against what had actually been promised.
- 03
Separate the two questions
Feature coverage and production readiness are not the same thing. The platform scored well on the first and badly on the second, which is why it looked finished.
- 04
Cost both tracks
A written estimate splitting the minimum work needed before accepting a real payment from everything else, so the client could choose what to fund.
Impact
The client got a fundable plan instead of an optimistic launch date
Payment-critical work was made explicit and separable from the rest
The uncomfortable answer arrived before the money did, not after