NutritionOS

NutritionOS — a platform dietitians use to manage client meal plans — came to us with a codebase their previous agency had abandoned mid-sprint. No documentation, no tests, two undeployed branches, and a CTO doing emergency fixes himself at midnight.

Alex Whitfield didn't want a rebuild pitch. He wanted to know whether the existing system could be made dependable, and what it would honestly cost to keep shipping on it.

We started with our standard one-week audit and gave Alex the unglamorous answer: the architecture was sound, the hygiene wasn't. Rebuilding would have wasted a year; stabilising would take a quarter.

The first three months went to invisible work — CI pipelines, monitoring, dependency updates, and tests around the billing and meal-plan engines where bugs hurt most. Feature velocity stayed deliberately low and we reported exactly why, weekly.

From month four onward the cadence inverted: with the foundation solid, the retainer shifted to features — a client-facing mobile view, integrations with two wearable APIs, and a reporting suite that became NutritionOS's main upsell. Eighteen months in, the weekly rhythm is unchanged.