Legacy e-commerce modernization

Your platform isn’t broken. It’s just stuck.

A PHP platform that works – but every change costs too much, every release is a risk, and only a handful of people really understand the codebase. There’s a way through that isn’t a rewrite – and with the right AI tooling in the right hands, work that used to be impossible to imagine now is within reach.

We’ve seen how this happens.

Every new feature costs three times what it should. And every month, the gap between your roadmap and what actually ships gets wider.

The platform was built years ago – on PHP that made sense at the time, for an e-commerce operation that was much smaller than what it’s become. Maybe it was built by an agency that’s long gone. Maybe by an in-house team that’s still around but has outgrown the system they inherited. Maybe it changed hands more than once. Maybe nobody ever got around to refactoring it. Maybe it started as a clean Laravel project that just kept growing, or a Symfony app where the original structure is still there somewhere, buried under years of workarounds.

How you got here varies. Where you are now is usually the same.

Shipping a simple feature shouldn’t be this hard.

But it is. Because first you have to figure out what the old PHP code is actually doing, then find the side effects nobody documented, then manually check that nothing broke somewhere completely unrelated. A new payment method, a checkout tweak, a promo campaign that should take days – each one turns into a drawn-out dig.

Your backlog keeps growing. Your output doesn’t.

Deployments are worse. They happen after hours, or on weekends – never during the day, when a problem would hit live traffic. There are no automated tests, so every release is a gamble. Rollback is manual. Deploys get put off – and the less often they happen, the riskier each one gets.

And the cost adds up, even if it’s hard to pin down in a spreadsheet. You’re not paying for slow developers. You’re paying for a codebase that actively fights every change. The technical debt has been compounding for years. It shows up in your burn rate and your output – and it gets worse every month you leave it.

Good developers walk away from it.

Someone new joins the team and it takes them months before they can do anything useful – because the system isn’t documented. The real logic lives in the heads of a few people who’ve been around since the beginning. Senior developers take one look at the codebase and walk away.

Hiring is hard. Keeping people is harder. And losing any one of them means real trouble keeping the system running.

It needs fixing. The hard part is doing it safely.

Here’s what makes it so hard to fix. Not any single one of these problems on its own – but the fact that they reinforce each other. The system needs to be modernised. A full rewrite is too expensive and too risky. And leaving things as they are makes everything worse, month after month – so the decision gets postponed.

There’s a way out. And it’s not a rewrite.

A big part of what we do isn’t building new things. It’s taking over platforms that already exist, stabilising them, and turning them into something a team can actually build on again. We work in PHP – Laravel, Symfony, and the broader ecosystem – and e-commerce is one of the verticals where we’ve done this most.

We take full ownership. Not the contractual kind – the kind where you care what state the code is in, you care what happens after you leave, and you don’t call it done until it’s something you’d put your name on.

We’ve done it enough times that we have a real process for it – built from all the things that go wrong when you don’t have one.

First, we learn what we’re dealing with.

Then we start fixing – one piece at a time.

A word on how we use AI.

AI tooling is a real part of how we work now – but not in the way the hype suggests. We don’t point it at your codebase and hope. AI does the heavy lifting where it genuinely adds value – reading large codebases, scaffolding tests, drafting documentation – and our engineers stay accountable for every line. Everything AI touches gets human review. Nothing ships unseen.

We use commercial AI tooling under terms that don’t train on your code, and AI-assisted work goes through the same review, testing, and security standards as the rest of what we build. The point isn’t to cut corners. It’s to make the work that used to be out of reach – thorough audits, full test coverage, proper documentation – feasible within a real budget, and done properly.

On the re-commerce platform described in a case study below, this went a step further: we built a track that let non-technical team members contribute production pull requests through conversation with AI. Safely, inside the existing development workflow, and aligned with the coding standards and conventions the engineers had set for the codebase. Every contribution was reviewed like any other change. It added a second stream of delivery alongside the core engineering work, without disrupting it.

How to start

Every takeover starts with a deep code audit – 1 – 3 weeks depending on the size of the codebase. You get a report: what’s there, what’s at risk, what it would take to stabilise, and an honest recommendation on what to do next. You own the report whether we continue together or not.

From there, most engagements move into one of these shapes:

• Retainer Ongoing access to a named engineer – maintenance, stabilisation work, smaller features. No minimum commitment, 30-day notice. Scales from a few hours a month to full-time.
• Dedicated team Your product, our team, we own delivery. We assign the people, manage the work, take responsibility for outcomes. Same people, same context, month after month.
• Project-based Defined scope – a migration, an integration, a specific modernisation sprint. We estimate, plan, and deliver. After the project, most clients move to a retainer because the team already knows the codebase.

Not sure which fits? We can figure it out together on the first call.

The right team can make this right

We’ve done this many times. On Laravel platforms, on Symfony platforms, on older PHP that predates both. We know the difference between a codebase that looks bad but is structurally fine and one that has genuine risk buried in it. And we know how to explain that difference honestly – to you, and to whoever else in your organisation needs to understand what you’re dealing with.

Taking over a legacy codebase is a different kind of work than building something from scratch. It takes patience. It takes the discipline to diagnose before you prescribe. It takes enough experience to know which problems need solving now and which ones can safely wait. A team that’s great at greenfield work can cause real damage here if they move too fast, too confidently – or if they stop caring the moment the contract is up.

We’ve been here before.

We’re a boutique software house based in Poland, working across Europe – a senior team that’s been building and modernising PHP platforms since 2015. Around 80% of our clients stay with us long term – and in many cases that’s because we took over a PHP platform that was in a bad shape and turned it into something they could build on again.

We don’t rotate people between projects. The engineers who start on your codebase are the ones who stay on it – learning the history, building real context, staying accountable for the decisions they make. No account managers sitting in the middle. You talk directly to the people doing the work.

Maybe now’s the time to deal with it.

If your codebase is the thing slowing everything else down, it’s worth 30 minutes video call.

No sales deck. No pitch. We’ll tell you honestly whether we’re the right fit and what the first step would look like.