The Kitchen Table
We Rescued a Broken Offshore Build — Here's How (EngagementFit)
Not every offshore development project rescue looks the same, but the feeling is familiar: a business has paid for software, the team that built it is gone, and what is left does not work. That was the situation when EngagementFit came to us with a corporate wellness platform that had fallen apart after an offshore build.
What we inherited
- Monolithic files running past 100,000 lines, almost impossible to work in safely.
- An incomplete CodeIgniter 3 to 4 migration, left half-done.
- No search, poor security, and two separate apps (a member app and a Bubble.io company app) that needed to become one.
What we did
We migrated and refactored the entire application into clean, modular components, and consolidated the separate apps into a single permission-based system. From there we rebuilt it properly:
- A new user interface (UI) on Bootstrap 5, with DataTables and Chart.js for reporting.
- One-time PIN (OTP) login and Amazon Web Services Simple Email Service (AWS SES) email notifications for security and reliability.
- A full admin dashboard with permissions, subscriptions, role assignments, event tracking, and portable document format (PDF) reporting.
- Company, team, and affiliate platforms, automated bulk onboarding, and artificial intelligence (AI) features on the Anthropic Claude application programming interface (API).
- A billing migration from Stripe to PayFast.
The result
The platform went from unusable to secure, scalable, and business-ready, able to manage affiliates, companies, and employees properly. What looked like a write-off became a working product the business could build on.
The lesson
A failed offshore build is rarely beyond saving. The path forward is an honest audit, ruthless prioritisation of what to keep versus rebuild, and disciplined engineering to finish it. If you are sitting on something similar, our project rescue service is built exactly for this, or read more about the EngagementFit rebuild.
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