Fixes & Rescues
How to Recover Your Codebase After an Agency Fails
Your agency shut down or the invoices stopped matching the work. Here's how to establish what you actually own and get the project moving again.
An agency shutting down mid-project is a different situation from a solo freelancer disappearing, but the recovery path shares the same first move: figure out exactly what you have access to and what was actually delivered, before making any new hiring decision.
How this differs from a single developer disappearing
Agencies usually have more formal contracts, which helps — you likely have a statement of work to compare against what was built. But agencies also often centralize access under company accounts rather than yours, which can mean a more tangled access-recovery process, especially if the agency's own team has scattered.
Step 1: Establish what you legally have rights to
Check your contract for IP assignment language — most agency contracts assign you ownership of custom code delivered and paid for, even if you don't currently have access to it. This matters because it changes the recovery conversation from "please give this to me" to "I'm owed access to what I already own."
Step 2: Request access to every account, in writing
Hosting, domain registrar, database, source control, app store developer accounts, third-party API keys — request admin or owner-level access to each, with a clear deadline, even if you expect a slow or no response. A paper trail matters if this escalates.
Step 3: Compare invoices against actual delivered work
If overcharging is part of the concern, this is where a code audit earns its cost specifically: it tells you, independently, what actually exists in the codebase — which features are real and working, which are stubbed out or fake, and which were billed but never built. That's evidence, not a guess.
Step 4: Get an honest, fixed quote to finish or fix it
Once you know what you actually have, a fixed quote for completing or repairing the app is possible — and it should be based on the audit's findings, not a fresh guess from whoever you hire next.
What if the code turns out to be genuinely unusable?
It happens, though less often than founders fear going in. If the audit finds the codebase isn't worth building on, you at least know that with certainty, and you can make the rebuild decision with real information — plus, in serious cases, documented evidence for any dispute over what was actually delivered.
Stuck on this?
Get a code audit — 48 hours, fixed price ($199). A written report on what's broken, what's salvageable, and a fixed quote to fix it.