Will our customers notice?

Only in the sense that things get better. A rebuild done behind a stable interface is invisible to users; what they see is that features start arriving again and that the product stops being slow.

Is a rebuild always the right answer?

No, and we will say so. Plenty of systems described as unmaintainable are actually fine once the deployment pipeline and the test suite are fixed. The assessment comes first, and it is worth having even if we do nothing else.

Can we keep shipping features during the rebuild?

Yes - that is the main argument for a staged approach. A two-year rewrite during which the product stands still is how competitors catch up. Each stage should leave you better off even if the next one never happens.

What if we only want part of it done?

That is a perfectly good outcome. Some customers take the assessment, fix the deployment pipeline and the worst two modules, and stop there because the cost of change has come down enough.

When every new feature costs more than the last one, the platform is the problem.

SaaS Rebuild in Oakham

SaaS Rebuild for businesses in Oakham. Cube Systems covers Oakham and Uppingham, Stamford and Cottesmore, with on-site implementation and support from our Olney office.

Product development
Oakham, Rutland
01234 672 617

Talk about your product All product development

Oakham is well within our regular travel radius from Olney, which means implementation here is done in person rather than over a screen share. That matters more than it sounds: most of what a system needs to know is learned by standing in the building.

A SaaS product that has been live for years accumulates a particular kind of debt. The framework is two majors behind, the test suite is unreliable so nobody trusts it, the database schema records decisions nobody remembers making, and the two people who understand the payments code have both left. Features that used to take a week take a month, and the roadmap has quietly become a list of things you are not going to do. A rebuild replaces the platform underneath a product your customers already like, without losing the accumulated understanding of the problem that makes it valuable. The point is not modern technology for its own sake - it is getting the cost of change back down.

Staged
One capability at a time, never a big bang
Assessment
A written verdict before anything is rebuilt
Weekly
Releases during working hours, not at midnight

What it involves

Inside saas rebuild

The parts of the job that decide whether a product can be sold at scale, rather than only delivered once.

A technical assessment first
Before anything is rebuilt, a written view of what is actually wrong, what it is costing you, and which parts are worth keeping. Sometimes the answer is that a rebuild is not warranted.
Strangler-fig, not big bang
The new platform takes over one capability at a time behind a stable interface, so the product keeps shipping and the project can be stopped at any point without waste.
The data model, revisited
A schema that reflects how the business works now rather than how it worked in the first year, with a migration that preserves every customer’s history.
Tests you can actually rely on
A test suite that gives a truthful answer, so a release stops being an event. Confidence in deployment is usually the single biggest change people notice.
Performance and cost under control
Query paths, caching, background work and infrastructure sizing revisited together, which often takes the hosting bill down as well as the page load times.
A codebase you can hire for
Mainstream, current, documented technology - so the next developer you hire can be productive in a fortnight rather than a quarter.

In practice

Where this usually starts

Anonymised, but not invented. These are the situations people describe to us before anything gets built.

A platform where releases had become frightening
The situation
An established SaaS business shipped once a quarter, at night, with the whole team on standby. The test suite had been red for so long that it was ignored, and two features had been abandoned mid-build because nobody could predict the side effects.
What changed
Capabilities were migrated one at a time onto a new platform with a reliable test suite and automated deployment. Releases now happen weekly during working hours, and the abandoned features shipped.
A product priced out by its own hosting bill
The situation
A data-heavy SaaS product was spending a large fraction of its revenue on infrastructure because of query patterns laid down in the first year and never revisited.
What changed
The data model and query paths were rebuilt around how customers actually use the product, with appropriate caching and background processing. Infrastructure cost fell substantially and the platform got faster at the same time.
A codebase nobody left could explain
The situation
A profitable platform had lost its original developers. The remaining team could keep it running but would not touch the billing or permissions code, so the roadmap had stalled for over a year.
What changed
The riskiest areas were rebuilt first, documented and covered by tests. The in-house team took ownership of the new code as it landed, and the roadmap restarted.

Local coverage

SaaS rebuild across Rutland

We cover Oakham and the surrounding area, including Town Centre, Barleythorpe, Langham, Braunston and Cottesmore, across the LE15 postcode districts. We also work with businesses in Uppingham, Stamford and Cottesmore and elsewhere in Rutland.

Postcode districts

LE15

Areas we cover

Town Centre, Barleythorpe, Langham, Braunston, Cottesmore, Market Overton, Empingham and Egleton.

Getting to you

Roughly 36 miles from our office in Olney, Buckinghamshire. Discovery, training and go-live are done on site as standard - not because it looks good on a proposal, but because most of what a system needs to know is learned in the building.

SaaS rebuild elsewhere in Rutland

All of Rutland

How it happens

How a build actually runs

The same process wherever you are, and for Oakham the sessions that benefit from being in a room are held in one.

Shape
A few sessions working out what the product is, who pays for it and what the first version has to do. You leave with a written scope and a price, whether or not you go further.
Design
Screens, flows and the data model behind them, agreed before anybody writes production code. Changing a decision here costs an afternoon rather than a month.
Build
Two-week cycles with something working at the end of each one, in an environment you can log into. No six-month silence followed by a reveal.
Launch
Billing live, onboarding tested, monitoring in place, and the first real customers on the platform with somebody watching closely.
Run
Hosting, support and continued development for as long as you want it - or a clean handover to your own team, with everything documented.

You might call it something else

SaaS rebuild goes by a lot of names - if you searched for any of these, this is the page you wanted.

SaaS replatform
Software rewrite
Legacy SaaS modernisation
Technical debt remediation
Platform re-architecture
Application re-engineering

Questions

The things people ask first

Only in the sense that things get better. A rebuild done behind a stable interface is invisible to users; what they see is that features start arriving again and that the product stops being slow.
No, and we will say so. Plenty of systems described as unmaintainable are actually fine once the deployment pipeline and the test suite are fixed. The assessment comes first, and it is worth having even if we do nothing else.
Yes - that is the main argument for a staged approach. A two-year rewrite during which the product stands still is how competitors catch up. Each stage should leave you better off even if the next one never happens.
That is a perfectly good outcome. Some customers take the assessment, fix the deployment pipeline and the worst two modules, and stop there because the cost of change has come down enough.