retrobay

§ 01Premise

Software is the easy part now. Your knowledge is the hard one.

The most valuable thing your business owns isn’t code — it’s what you know about yourselves. The processes that actually work. The rules only your people remember. The reasons you do things the way you do.

We take that knowledge and compose it into an audit and custom software to match. We start from what you already know, not from a blank page.

When we’re done, the system is yours — source, schema, decisions, all of it. We build on stacks the open market can hire for. You’re free to take it anywhere next.

§ 02Process

Four moves, in order.

No statement of work that grows. Each phase is its own deliverable, and you decide whether to continue at the end of it.

  1. 01 · Listen ~ 2 wk

    We sit with your people.

    Operators, support, accounting, the one person who remembers why. No survey, no consultant template.

  2. 02 · Audit ~ 4 wk

    30–50 pages, fixed price.

    A structured description of the system, the risks, the options. After this you decide whether to keep going.

  3. 03 · Build ~ 8 wk

    Software to match.

    Open stacks the market can hire for. We build against the audit, not a wishlist that grew on Slack.

  4. 04 · Handover — 1 day

    Keys, on paper.

    Source, schema, infrastructure, decisions log — yours. Take it anywhere next. We’re a step, not a vendor.

§ 03Four walls

Why companies don’t migrate — until they have to

Four walls that hold companies inside the old system longer than they’d like. The audit is what gets you past them.

  • 01 · Deadline Forced moves

    When the wall hits, it’s too late

    A deadline you didn’t pick — a regulation, a hardware failure, an operating-system retirement — exposes a problem you’ve been deferring. At that moment, the only answer left is the most expensive one.

    “An audit at year three is five thousand. The same audit at week two of a crisis is ten times that — and it forces decisions you’d otherwise have made calmly.” — from a 2025 engagement debrief
  • 02 · Invoice Bundled fixes

    The bill that arrives isn’t the fix

    When the deadline lands, your incumbent vendor has a quote ready. It includes the regulatory change. It also includes hardware refresh, retraining, per-seat licensing, multi-year support. The mandatory bit is small. The bundle around it is what scales the invoice.

    “The mandatory bit was twelve thousand. The bundle around it was a hundred and ninety. The audit gave us an independent second opinion in time.” — operations director, manufacturing
  • 03 · Source The lock-in

    You don’t own what you paid for

    Your system runs on a runtime you license and binary files no one can read. The source code lives with the vendor. Even if you find someone cheaper, you can’t hand them what you have — they’d have to start from scratch.

    “We bought the software in 2009. We’ve never seen the source. The way out begins by writing down what the system actually does.” — IT director, 180-person ERP customer
  • 04 · Dialect The language

    The source is yours. Nobody can read it anymore.

    Sometimes the lock-in isn’t the vendor — it’s the language. Delphi, Magic xpa, FoxPro, Clarion, Progress, VB6: the people who can still read this code are senior, scarce, and near retirement. Their day-rate reflects the monopoly.

    “The audit takes the source as input and produces a system on a stack you can hire for normally. The language stops being the moat.” — retrobay · approach memo

§ 04The first deliverable

The audit is the first deliverable.

Before we write a single line of code, you get a document — 30 to 50 pages of structured description of your system, the risks, and the options.

Fixed price, fixed time. After it, you decide whether to continue with us. A public worked example follows — what an audit looks like applied to a generic small-manufacturing ERP.

Length
30–50 pp
Time
4 weeks
Price
Fixed

Lookup into a live engagement

Open the sample audit

§ 05An engagement

What you give us. What we make. What you keep.

Symmetric. Documented. You don’t sign anything that hides the seams.

You give us↓

Access & context

  • The system, the runtime, the licenses
  • Time with the people who know the system
  • Slack threads, binders, post-its
  • Permission to ask why

We make—

The audit, then the system

  • 30–50pp audit, fixed price
  • Software built against the audit
  • On stacks you can hire for
  • Decisions log, in plain English

You keep↑

Everything, when we leave

  • Source code & repository
  • Schema, ERD, migrations
  • Infrastructure & credentials
  • The right to walk away