SaaS Platform Modernization

A facilities management SaaS company was stuck on a legacy PHP application. No mobile support. Feature development was painfully slow. Years of technical debt made every change risky.

Problem

The architecture could not support the features their customers needed. Adding mobile access was practically impossible on the existing codebase. Every new feature took weeks because developers had to work around years of accumulated technical debt.

The company was losing competitive ground. Competitors shipped mobile apps while they were still patching a desktop-only web application.

What They’d Tried

They tried incremental improvements. Each one introduced new problems because the underlying architecture was fragile. Small changes had unpredictable side effects.

They hired more developers. More people on a bad codebase just meant more people working around the same problems. Velocity did not improve.

They considered a complete rewrite but feared the risk. Rewrites are notorious for going over budget and over time. They were right to be cautious.

What We Did

We did a database-first rebuild. We started with the data model because it was the most valuable part of the system. The PHP code was the liability. The data and its structure were the asset.

We rebuilt the application on modern technology using Flutter for cross-platform support. We migrated all data with zero downtime. The new system launched alongside the old one, and clients transitioned on their own schedule.

Outcome

Feature iteration became 5x faster. Mobile apps launched within months of the rebuild completing. The team could respond to feature requests that were impossible on the old platform. Development became predictable again.

The Database-First Lesson

The data model was the asset. The PHP code was the liability. By preserving and improving the data model while replacing the application code, we kept what mattered and discarded what held them back. A rewrite does not have to be risky if you protect the right thing.