Built it yourself?
You shipped it without us. Now someone wants to buy it.
Bubble, Lovable, Replit, Softr, Glide, v0, Cursor — whatever you used, this is not a lecture about it. Getting to something real without a developer is a genuine achievement, and these tools are good at what they do.
The problem is not that you built it. It is that the first serious customer is about to ask questions the tool never made you answer.
What we actually find
Six things that break when a self-built app meets a real customer
None of these are the platform’s fault. They are the things a developer would have set up without mentioning, and nobody was there to do it.
01
Access control that was never designed
Platform sign-in is usually fine. What tends not to be is everything after it: who can see whose records, what an admin can do, and whether a rule that was added in a hurry actually holds. Row-level security that was generated rather than reasoned about is a common place for this to go wrong.
02
No environments, so every change is live
If there is no staging copy, every fix is tested on your customers. That is survivable at ten users and it is not at two hundred.
03
Backups you do not control, and a restore nobody has tried
Most platforms back something up. The questions that matter are whether you can get a restore, how old it would be, and whether anyone has ever actually done one.
04
Secrets where they can be read
API keys pasted into the front end, or into a prompt, are readable by anyone who looks. It is the single most common thing we find.
05
No audit trail — which is the one procurement asks about
Who changed what, when, and can you show it. Almost nothing built this way has it, and almost every security questionnaire wants it.
06
Answers you cannot give about someone else’s platform
Where the data sits, who the sub-processors are, what the DPA says. A buyer will ask. "I am not sure" is the wrong answer to close a deal on.
Where it actually bites
The security questionnaire is where self-built apps fail
You win a pilot with a company big enough to have a procurement process. They send two hundred questions about access control, backups, incident response, sub-processors and personal data.
A self-built app will not have most of the answers, and some of the honest answers will lose you the deal. That is the moment founders call us — and it is the worst possible moment, because the clock is already running.
Getting UK businesses through exactly this is what our parent company does every week. How the certify side works.
The three honest answers
Sometimes the right answer is to keep it
Keep it, and harden it
The product is doing its job and the problems are fixable where it stands.
We fix the access rules, get the secrets out of the client, put real backups and monitoring around it, and write the evidence pack. Often the right answer, and by far the cheapest.
Extract the part that matters
One piece is load-bearing — payments, a calculation, customer data — and the rest is fine.
We rebuild that piece properly and leave the rest where it is. You get the bit that has to be right without paying for a full rebuild.
Rebuild it
You have hit the platform’s ceiling, or the cost curve has turned against you, or a buyer will not accept it.
A real build, 8–12 weeks, with everything you have learned from the version you already have. That knowledge is worth a lot — you are not starting from a blank page.
We will tell you which of those three you are in, and we will say "keep it" when keeping it is right. A studio that always concludes you need a rebuild is a studio you cannot trust to assess anything.
How you find out which
A week, £2,500, and a written answer
We go through what you have built, find what would fail a buyer’s questions, and tell you which of the three options you are in — in writing, with a costed plan and the reasoning.
It is credited against the build if you go ahead within 90 days, and it is yours either way. If the answer is “harden it and keep going”, that is a cheap week that saved you a rebuild.
And if it is a rebuild
A build is £30,000–£48,000 over 8–12 weeks, and Run starts at £395 a month from go-live. Everything is priced on the pricing page, before you talk to us.
Find out where you stand before a buyer tells you
Tell us what you built it on and what the customer has asked for. We will tell you quickly whether this is a fortnight of tidying or a rebuild.
It goes to [email protected].