Book a Health CheckSomewhere between 2008 and 2018, a developer built the application your business still runs on today. Custom PHP, maybe CakePHP, maybe a framework nobody remembers. It has worked for years. And now that developer is gone — retired, moved on, or simply unreachable.
Nothing is on fire — yet. But you already know the risks, because they keep you up at night.
You don't need a rebuild. You need someone who can safely take over what you already have — and we do this for a living.
Every engagement starts with the Health Check. It's fixed-price, it's fast, and the report is yours no matter what you decide to do next.
A full assessment of your application: code condition, security exposure, PHP and framework version risk, hosting and backup situation, bus-factor risk — plus a full database assessment covering performance, indexing, backup integrity, version risk, and data safety.
We fix what the Health Check found — and your app keeps running the whole time. No downtime, no disruption to the business.
Your app gets a team again. Maintenance, small features, and gradual strangler-pattern modernization — no big-bang rewrites, ever.
Over two weeks, we examine everything that determines how much risk you're actually carrying: the condition of the code, known security exposure, how far behind your PHP and framework versions are, where the app is hosted and what happens when that hosting ends, and whether a complete copy of the code exists anywhere off the server.
The database gets the same treatment — performance, indexing, backup integrity, version risk, and data safety — because for most businesses the data is worth more than the application around it.
You get a written report in plain English: what's urgent, what can wait, and what each item costs to fix. No jargon, no scare tactics. It's yours to keep, and you can take it to any developer you like.
If the report finds real problems — and in an 8-to-15-year-old application it usually does — we scope a fixed-price sprint to fix them. Typical work: patching security holes, upgrading PHP and the framework, migrating off end-of-life hosting, and putting the fundamentals in place: tested backups, a staging environment, and version control.
The price is fixed before we start, scoped directly from the audit. And your app keeps running the entire time — stabilization happens on a staging copy, with careful rollouts.
From $1,500/month, your application has a team again. We handle maintenance and monitoring, ship small features and fixes, and — where it makes sense — gradually modernize the app using the strangler pattern: replacing pieces one at a time while the whole keeps working. No big-bang rewrites, ever.
And because Skyhawk Labs is two developers, ongoing care means exactly that: you'll always be one call away from the people who actually know your code.
A professional-services firm ran their entire operation on a custom CakePHP application built more than a decade ago. The original developer was unavailable, and the hosting contract was ending. We audited the system, migrated it to modern managed hosting, upgraded the platform, and added backups and a staging environment — without a minute of downtime. Today the app is maintained, documented, and boring, in the best possible way.
Almost never. Rewrites lose years and six figures, and most legacy apps don't need one. We stabilize what you have and modernize it incrementally — piece by piece, while it keeps running.
We've seen worse — truly. Code that's quietly run a business for a decade deserves respect, not judgment. We don't critique, we triage.
That's fine. The Legacy Health Check report is yours to keep, and you can take it to any developer you like. No strings attached.
PHP in all its versions, CakePHP and other PHP frameworks, MySQL and Postgres, heavily customized WordPress and WooCommerce — and the hosting environments they live on.
That's more common than you'd think. Part of the Health Check is locating a complete copy of your code and database, getting both into version control, and making sure a tested backup exists somewhere other than the server itself.
No. Stabilization work happens against a staging copy, and changes are rolled out carefully. Keeping your app running is a hard requirement of every engagement.
Book a Legacy Health Check. You talk directly with the two of us, we get read-only access to what exists, and two weeks later you have a written report ranking what's urgent, what can wait, and what it costs.
A Legacy Health Check is $2,500, takes two weeks, and the report is yours to keep either way.