Self-check

Sixteen questions in your words. No email gate. Print it, copy it into ChatGPT, or tick the boxes here. Honest scoring below — including what you can fix yourself over a weekend.

1. If the person who built this left tomorrow, someone else could add a feature within a week.
2. You know where the backups are, and someone has restored from one on purpose.
3. You can tell, without asking anyone, whether the app is working right now.
4. When a change ships, automated checks run before it reaches the team that opens it every morning.
5. The numbers in the report match the invoices you send — or you know exactly why they do not.
6. Client data access is documented: who can see what, and through which accounts.
7. There is a written list of what the tool is intentionally not supposed to do.
8. Integrations (email, payments, CRM, sheets) are named, and you know which ones are brittle.
9. You have a place where “we already tried X and it failed because…” is written down.
10. Staging exists separately from production, or you have an honest reason it does not.
11. A bad deploy can be rolled back without rebuilding from memory.
12. Secrets and API keys do not live in the chat history or in a shared spreadsheet.
13. You know the monthly cost of the tool (hosting, tokens, SaaS) within about 20%.
14. The last production incident has a short write-up and at least one practice that changed after it.
15. Your team can keep building with an AI assistant without you personally babysitting every diff.
16. You would be comfortable showing the codebase to a new contractor without a two-day oral history.

How to read your score

Count the boxes you could not check.

• 0–3 noYou are in better shape than most. Keep the notes and tests current; a full diagnostic may be overkill unless something is already on fire.
• 4–5 noNormal for a tool that grew past its first year. Several items — backups restore test, a root agent file, separating staging — you can close yourself in a weekend if someone owns them.
• 6+ no, and this tool sits on revenueWorth a structured diagnosis. Idle team time and bad client numbers usually cost more than $1,900.

A high “no” count is not a verdict on you. It is the usual bill for shipping useful software fast without leaving memory in the system.

If more than five are “no”

And this is an operational process your revenue depends on — that is what the diagnostic is for: priorities, fix vs rebuild vs buy, and a written estimate for the next step. You keep the report either way.

Diagnostic — $1,900, 5 business days

See a sample report · Full Rescue page