App modernisation.Suddenly affordable. Often fixed-cost.
Every business has one: the system that runs everything and that nobody dares touch. Rewrites used to be so risky and expensive that living with the pain felt safer. AI-assisted engineering has changed that maths — and we'll show you by exactly how much, in writing.
Fixed-cost options
A scoped price you can budget, not an open meter.
No big-bang risk
Modernised in stages while the old system keeps running.
AI-accelerated
Machines do the mechanical migration; engineers do the judgement.
Trusted with the systems NZ businesses actually run on
From "nobody touch it" to a platform you can build on.
Modernisation isn't one thing — it's a spectrum from targeted upgrades to full replatforming. We scope the smallest intervention that gets you where you need to go.
Legacy System Audit
AI-assisted analysis of your whole codebase — what it really does, where the risk lives, and a costed modernisation roadmap.
Framework & Version Upgrades
Old .NET Framework to .NET 8, PHP 5 to 8, AngularJS to modern Angular or Vue — mechanically migrated, humanly reviewed.
Architecture Modernisation
Monoliths carved into maintainable services where it pays — and left alone where it doesn't. No cargo-cult microservices.
Cloud Replatforming
Off the server under the stairs and onto AWS or Azure — with the resilience, backups and security your business deserves.
UI & UX Modernisation
The 2009 interface your team apologises for, rebuilt as something fast and pleasant — without changing how the business works.
Safety Nets & Test Retrofit
AI-generated test coverage that captures how the old system behaves before anything changes — so nothing regresses silently.
Why modernisation suddenly became affordable
For twenty years, the honest advice about legacy rewrites was "don't, unless you absolutely must". The economics were brutal: months of engineers reverse-engineering undocumented behaviour, migrating code line by line, and hand-writing tests for logic nobody fully remembered. Budgets blew out, projects stalled, and the graveyard of failed rewrites grew. So businesses kept paying the quiet tax instead — security risk, hiring pain, integrations that can't be built, and a platform nobody can change.
AI-assisted engineering has genuinely changed this. Modern AI tooling can read an entire legacy codebase and map what it actually does; translate old patterns to modern frameworks mechanically; and generate the regression tests that prove behaviour was preserved. The parts of modernisation that consumed 70% of the budget — comprehension, translation, test coverage — have collapsed in cost. What's left is what should always have been the job: engineers making judgement calls about architecture, data and risk.
That collapse is what makes fixed-price modernisation possible. After an audit (where AI maps your system and we validate the map), the scope is genuinely knowable — so for most systems we can put a fixed number next to it. If your last modernisation quote made the board laugh, it's worth asking again.
From idea to production, without the drama.
A predictable process, working software every fortnight, and no invoice surprises. Here's how a project runs.
Scope
A free scoping call, then a written proposal with honest costs, timeline and the trade-offs that matter.
Design
UX flows and interface design validated with real users — before a line of production code is written.
Build
Fortnightly releases you can click, test and steer. You always know exactly where the project is.
Launch & grow
Production launch with monitoring and support — then a roadmap of improvements driven by real usage.
The systems we rescue most often.
We'd been quoted numbers that made the project impossible — twice. Flipmind's audit showed us exactly what the system did, and the fixed price they put next to the rebuild was a third of the previous quote. It shipped in stages and the business never stopped.
App Modernisation — Frequently Asked Questions
Far less than it did five years ago. Targeted upgrades (framework versions, cloud replatforming) often land in the NZ$20k–60k range; full modernisations of substantial line-of-business systems typically run NZ$60k–200k — where the same work used to start at multiples of that. After an audit we can usually offer a fixed price, so the number you budget is the number you pay.
Three ways. AI reads and maps the entire legacy codebase — including the undocumented behaviour that used to take months to reverse-engineer. It translates old patterns to modern frameworks mechanically, with engineers reviewing rather than retyping. And it generates regression tests that capture how the system behaves today, so we can prove nothing broke. Comprehension, translation and test coverage were most of the old cost — and they're exactly what AI is best at.
For most systems, yes — after an audit. The reason modernisation quotes were traditionally open-ended is that nobody knew what was in the codebase until they were waist-deep. AI-assisted auditing removes that unknown: we map the system first, then price the work with the map in hand. If a system genuinely can't be fixed-priced (they exist), we'll tell you that at audit stage — not at invoice stage.
No — big-bang cutovers are how rewrites fail, so we don't do them. We modernise in stages: the old system keeps running while modern pieces come online alongside it, usually behind the same URLs your team already uses. Each stage is tested against the old system's behaviour before anything switches over.
That's normal — the developer left, the documentation was a promise, and the system kept running anyway. It's also exactly the situation AI-assisted auditing is built for: we recover an accurate picture of what the system does from the code itself, and you get that documentation as a deliverable whether or not you modernise with us.
Most of what NZ businesses actually run: .NET Framework and VB.NET, Classic ASP, PHP 5/7 (including old WordPress, CodeIgniter and custom builds), AngularJS and jQuery front ends, Access and FoxPro databases, and on-prem Windows servers. If your stack is older or stranger than that, we'd genuinely enjoy the conversation.