STRATEGY & AUDIT
Castle runs fixed-price audits and product strategy engagements for teams about to make an expensive decision. Two weeks, a written plan, and an honest view on what to build, what to rebuild, and what to leave alone.
THE FRAME
You're on a no-code stack and something has to change.
Pages are slow. Workflows are held together with integrations. You can't run a real query against your own data. You know you need to rebuild, and you don't know how much of it, in what order, or what it costs.
You have a hypothesis and no product yet.
You know your market better than anyone. What you don't have is a scoped build, a commercial model, or a clear answer when an investor asks what you're actually shipping first.
That work is Foundations
You have a system nobody wants to touch.
The legacy platform, the unmaintained admin tool, the module three other things depend on. Somebody needs to assess it properly before anyone commits a roadmap to it.
THE AUDIT
We spend two weeks inside your product, your codebase, and your data. At the end you get a written plan: what to keep, what to rebuild, what to throw away, what it costs, how long it takes, and what could go wrong.
The plan is yours. If you take it to another studio, or hand it to a CTO you hire next month, that works. Most founders leave with a clearer picture of their own product whether they hire us or not, and we'd rather that than sell a rebuild nobody needed.
DELIVERABLES
Architecture review
How the product is built, where it breaks under load, and which parts are worth keeping.
Data audit
What's in your database, what shape it's in, and what migrating it actually involves.
Dependency map
Every plugin, integration and third-party service the product relies on, and what happens to each one in a rebuild.
BEYOND THE AUDIT
Product strategy
Audience definition, value proposition, roadmap sequencing. What to build first and why, before anyone opens a code editor.
Foundations: product, commercial and capital
Pricing, unit economics, business model design, pitch deck and investor story. For founders raising, the product plan and the commercial plan are the same document.
Learn more about Foundations
Paid discovery for established teams
HOW IT RUNS
Days
1-2
Access and orientation
Repo access, database access, a walkthrough with whoever knows the product best. We ask a lot of questions early so we're not guessing later.
Days
3-7
Assessment
Architecture, data, dependencies, performance. We work through the product the way an engineer inheriting it would.
Days
8-10
Options & costings
We build out the realistic paths, not just the one we'd pick. Each with scope, sequence, cost band and risk.
Day
10
Walkthrough and handover
We take you through the plan live, answer everything, then send it. No follow-up sequence, no drip campaign.
WHO THIS IS FOR
You're weighing up a decision that costs real money to get wrong. A rebuild, a first build, a platform migration, a module nobody wants to own. You'd rather spend two weeks and a fixed fee finding out than six months finding out the hard way.
WHO THIS ISN'T FOR
If you're pre-traction and still validating an idea, don't pay us to audit it. Stay on the no-code stack until there's something worth scaling. If you already know exactly what you're building and just need it built, skip the audit and talk to us about the build instead.
Questions
Access and time with the right person. That means read access to your repository and database, the admin panels and third-party accounts the product relies on, and a walkthrough with whoever knows it best. Expect a lot of questions in the first two days, so we are not guessing later.
Yes. We audit no-code apps, AI-generated codebases and conventional stacks the same way. On a no-code platform we work through the editor, the data export and every plugin and workflow, so the plan covers what moving the data and the logic would actually involve, not just the screens.
Then that is the recommendation you get. Sometimes the right move is fixing two bottlenecks and leaving everything else alone, and the plan says so in the same detail as any rebuild path. We would rather you spend the saving on growth than sell you a rebuild nobody needed.
We are happy to sign an NDA before any access is granted. We ask for read-only access wherever the platform allows it, keep what we review inside the engagement, and hand access back when the plan is delivered. If your organisation has its own security requirements, we work within them.
No. Anyone facing an expensive decision about existing software can use it. Established product teams use it to scope a legacy rebuild or platform migration before committing a roadmap, and mission-led organisations use it to give their board an independent view before they fund a build.
Book a free 30-minute call. We'll talk through what you're working on and tell you whether an audit would help or whether you already have the answer. If it's the second one, we'll say so.
Software that holds up under real use.
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