A founder reaches out. The message is some variation of: "Our system has a lot of problems, we think we need to rewrite it, can you give us an estimate?"
My answer is always the same: I'll give you a number after I've spent two hours in the codebase. Not before.
This is not a negotiating tactic. It's the only honest answer. A quote without an audit is a lottery — either I overprice to cover uncertainty I haven't measured, or I underestimate something serious and we both regret it four weeks in. Neither outcome is useful to you.
There's also a more fundamental issue: most rescue projects don't need a full rewrite. They need targeted stabilization of the two or three things that are actually broken, while everything the previous team built correctly — and there's usually something — stays in place. A stabilization is, in most cases I've seen, materially cheaper than a rewrite and delivers a working system faster. But I can only tell you which situation you're in after I've looked. Anyone who quotes a full rewrite before opening the repository is either guessing or has a business reason to prefer rewrites.
This is what those two hours look like.
