Can someone fix my vibe coded app?

the short answer

Yes, and it is rarely a rebuild. Apps built with Bolt, Lovable, v0, Cursor or Replit fail in the same predictable places — who can reach the data, what got shipped inside the browser, and what happens under real traffic. The work is usually a few days of targeted fixes against a known list, not months of starting over.

AI tools are genuinely good at building working software. What they don't do is the pass that happens after it works — the one where somebody asks what a stranger could reach, what happens at a thousand users instead of ten, and what the recovery plan is. If you built something, launched it, and now feel uneasy about real people using it, that instinct is usually correct and the fix is usually smaller than you fear.

What usually needs fixing

Ordered by what it costs when it goes wrong rather than by how hard it is to fix — the first three are all invisible while the app appears to work perfectly.

What breaks	What you'd notice
Anyone can read the databasecritical	Broken access control, the risk OWASP ranks first. One customer can load another customer's records, usually by changing a number in the address bar.
A key shipped inside the browsercritical	A password-equivalent sitting in your app's JavaScript, where anyone can read it and spend your money or reach your data directly.
Actions nobody checks permission forcritical	The delete button is hidden from users who shouldn't see it — but the thing behind it still runs for anyone who calls it directly.
Payments that can run twicehigh	A double-tap or a retried notification charges the card twice or creates the order twice. You find out during reconciliation.
Queries that fall over as you growhigh	Instant with ten rows, eight seconds with ten thousand. Usually one missing index or one query running once per row.
Costs that scale with traffic, not customershigh	A bill that grows faster than your revenue, because something recalculates or re-fetches on every single page view.
No way to know it brokemedium	No error tracking, so the first report of a problem is a customer leaving. This is the cheapest thing on the list to fix.
Backups nobody has ever restoredmedium	The only item here that can be permanent. Everything else is a bad day; this one can be an unrecoverable one.

Do I need to rebuild from scratch?

Almost never, and the instinct to rebuild is usually the more expensive mistake. The code an AI tool wrote is generally real, working code — what's missing is the layer of rules around it that nobody asked for. Adding those rules is targeted work against a known list. Rebuilding throws away everything that already works in order to solve a problem the rebuild doesn't automatically fix.

It is worth being blunt about the incentive here: rebuilding is a much bigger engagement than fixing, so "you'll need to start over" is advice you should always weigh against who is giving it. If someone recommends a rebuild before they have looked at your app, that is a sales position, not a technical finding.

The honest version is that a second team writing the same features from scratch, without ever naming the rules that were missing, produces a cleaner codebase with the same holes in it.

How do I know whether it's worth fixing or starting over?

Fixing is the right call when the app does roughly what you want and the problems are about safety, correctness and scale. Starting over is the right call when what you actually want has changed so much that most of the existing screens would be thrown away anyway — that's a product decision, not a code-quality one.

Three signals that genuinely point to a rebuild: the data model is wrong in a way that every feature has to work around, you're on a platform that can't do something core to the business, or you can no longer make a small change without breaking something unrelated. Note that only the third is about code quality, and it's often fixable on its own.

Three that don't, despite how they feel: the code is ugly, it was written by AI, or a developer you spoke to said they wouldn't have built it that way. None of those affect whether your customers' data is safe or whether your app survives a busy week.

What does the work actually involve?

Three steps. A call to understand what you've built and what you're worried about, a pass through the app looking for the failures above, and a report in plain English that ranks what we found by how much it matters and how much work it is. Fixing is a separate decision you make after you've seen that list.

We deliberately split finding from fixing. You should be able to read the findings and decide to fix them yourself, hand them to a developer you already trust, or ask us — and that choice should come after you have the information, not before. The full process is here.

What we look at is published rather than proprietary: the seven-layer production check is the same list on every engagement, and you can walk most of it yourself before ever speaking to us.

How long does it take?

Days rather than weeks for the review itself on most apps. The exact scope comes out of the first call — a small app with a handful of screens is quick, and a multi-tenant product with payments and integrations takes longer. Fixes are scoped separately once you know what's actually there.

What will it cost?

Startup-friendly pricing, scoped to your project. We don't publish a number because the honest one depends on things nobody knows before looking: how many places store data, whether money moves through the app, how many user types there are, and whether you want the fixes done or just the findings.

What that means in practice is that you get a scope and a figure after the first call, before any work starts — not an estimate that moves once someone opens the code. If you'd rather compare a fixed price up front, that's a completely reasonable way to buy, and there are people who sell it that way.

Do I have to hand over my code?

No. A repository is the fastest route, but a live URL works, and if you're in stealth then a description of what you built and what it's built on is enough to scope the work. We'll sign an NDA before you send anything — just ask, and it isn't a negotiation.

How do I judge whether someone is any good at this?

Ask three things: who specifically is doing the work, what their method is, and what they'd hand you at the end. Anyone can say "experienced engineers". Far fewer will name the person, publish the checklist they walk before you pay, and tell you plainly that you keep the code and owe them nothing afterwards.

Good signs. A named human you can look up rather than a team page of stock photos. A method published in public, so you can judge it before you buy. A finding shown to you early, in your own app, in language you understand. A clear statement that the code and the report are yours.

Warning signs. A rebuild recommended before anyone has looked. A fixed price to "fix your app" quoted before anyone has seen it — a fixed price for a fixed scope is fine, but nobody can price unknown repairs honestly. Findings delivered as a raw scanner export with no one interpreting them. And any arrangement where you can't maintain the result without them.

Where this cuts against us: if your app is small and your worry is specific — one page is slow, one integration is failing — you may want a freelancer for a few hours rather than a full review. A review is worth it when you don't yet know what's wrong, or when real customer data is involved and you can't afford to guess.

Can I just fix it myself?

Several of these, genuinely yes. Moving a key out of the front end, adding error tracking, and putting a limit on your login page are well-documented jobs with clear finish lines. The two worth getting help with are database access rules and anything touching payments, because both fail silently — the app keeps working while being wrong.

That's the honest split, and it's the same one we give away for nothing across the guides. Start with the two-account test — it takes five minutes and finds the one OWASP ranks first. If you read that, fix three things and never speak to us, the page did its job.

Want someone to actually look at it?

Tell us what you built and what you're worried about. You'll get a plain-English list of what we found, ranked — and the decision about what to fix stays yours. Startup-friendly pricing, scoped to your project.

Book an Audit