A legacy PHP monolith powering a two-sided B2B marketplace was choking growth. We rebuilt it from the ground up in 12 weeks — modern stack, real-time inventory, and a platform the client's own team can ship on.
The client had been running a B2B marketplace on a PHP 5.6 monolith for seven years. With 200+ supplier integrations, the codebase had grown into a tangle of shared state and undocumented hacks. Every new feature risked breaking something else. Deployments required a full-team war room.
Page loads averaged 8 seconds under normal load. During peak order windows, the system would degrade further. The client had received a quote from a large agency to rebuild the platform — €380,000, 18–24 months. They came to us for a second opinion.
We started with a 5-day technical blueprint. Rather than proposing a full rewrite on day one, we mapped the existing system — identified which parts of the monolith were stable, which were critical paths, and which could be replaced iteratively.
The result was a strangler-fig migration: a new Angular frontend served by a Java/Spring Boot API layer, with the legacy system running in parallel during cutover. Supplier integrations were rebuilt as webhook-driven microservices, allowing each supplier to be migrated and tested independently without downtime.
Six two-week sprints. Sprint 1–2 established the data model and API contracts. Sprint 3–4 built the core buyer and supplier flows. Sprint 5 was the cutover strategy — parallel running with traffic gradually shifted. Sprint 6 was stabilization and handoff.
Every sprint delivered working, tested code to staging. The client's team had full repo access throughout and attended every sprint demo. By sprint 4 they were already shipping small features themselves — the sign of a codebase that's been built to be maintained, not just to ship.
Full production deployment at week 12. Page loads dropped from an average of 8 seconds to under 2 seconds. The supplier integration layer handled 200+ active suppliers on launch day without incident. The client's engineering team reported that the new codebase took less than a week to onboard new developers — versus months on the old system.
Against the competing quote of €380K over 18–24 months, we delivered the same scope for €200K in 12 weeks. The $180K delta was largely attributable to AI-assisted development compressing routine work — API scaffolding, test generation, data migration scripts — freeing our senior engineers for architecture and review.
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