The software you already have can carry the next decade — once it is modernised to do it.

Yes — roughly 35% of our modernisation work is done for other agencies and consultancies under NDA. Three partnership models: white-label (your brand, our engineers, fully invisible), agency-of-record (a dedicated pod working as your in-house capacity), and capacity overflow (sprint-by-sprint when your team is full). All work lives in your client’s repositories, owned by them. Time zones overlap with the UK, EU, and US workday, and we run inside your tooling as standard.

Our entire engineering team is based in Noida, India — 40 people in our iThum Tower B office, founded in 2015. We work with product teams and agencies across the UK, US, Ireland, Australia, the UAE, Germany, and the Netherlands. Working hours overlap with UK mornings, the full EU workday, and US afternoons, which matters for modernisation work where a real-time overlap helps during planning and migrations. Every engagement has a named project lead as a single point of contact.

For the large majority of teams, modernising in place is the right answer — it keeps the product running and earning, returns value every week, and every step is reversible. A full rewrite is justified only in a narrow set of cases: the platform is genuinely end-of-life, or the original architecture physically cannot carry where the product must go. Even then, the smart way to rebuild is incrementally, slice by slice, never as a big bang. We give an honest read on which your situation calls for, and we will say so plainly if a rewrite is genuinely warranted.

Modernisation engagements range from a focused piece of work — a modernisation audit, a framework upgrade, a performance pass — through to a full incremental modernisation programme. The scope drivers are the size and condition of the system, how much upgrade debt has accumulated, the state of the test coverage, and whether it is a one-time effort or an ongoing retainer. We scope every engagement against the specific situation, are competitive with established engineering rates internationally, and a modernisation audit is the lowest-commitment way to get a costed, staged plan.

The important point is the shape of the timeline, not a single number. Because we modernise incrementally, value starts arriving within the first few weeks — the first stabilised and modernised slices are real improvements — and the programme then continues at a steady, predictable pace. A modernisation audit is typically 2 to 3 weeks. Unlike a rewrite, there is no distant all-or-nothing finish line, and the programme can be paused at any time with every gain kept. The better question than “how long is the whole thing” is “how soon does the first slice deliver” — and the answer is weeks.

Yes — that is the core of how we work. We modernise in place, in slices, with no big-bang switchover. Each slice is modernised, shipped, and confirmed in production before the next begins, and there is a tested rollback at every step. Migrations use the strangler-fig pattern: the new runs alongside the old, one piece moves at a time, and both run together during the transition. The product keeps serving customers the entire way through, and downtime caused is one of the metrics we hold to zero.

Legacy software is software that has become risky and expensive to change — and that is about condition, not age. A well-tested, well-understood ten-year-old system is not a legacy problem; a two-year-old system nobody dares touch is. The usual causes are some mix of an outdated platform, missing tests, thin documentation, the original authors having left, and years of accumulated shortcuts. The practical test: if making a small change feels slow and nerve-wracking, and nobody is confident what it might break, the system is legacy regardless of how old it is.

It starts with making the system visible. Before changing anything, we put observability in place to see how the system genuinely behaves — what is slow, what errors, what customers depend on most — and we write tests that pin down current behaviour. That data corrects assumptions about where the real problems are and surfaces the best first slice: something both valuable and contained enough to be a clean early win. We deliberately do not start with the scariest part of the system; an early, confidence-building win sets the whole programme up to succeed.

Yes — and that is a real advantage of modernising incrementally. Because the work happens in small, independent slices, feature delivery and modernisation run side by side: your team ships customer-facing improvements while the foundation is strengthened underneath. The two help each other, because modernised areas are faster to build features in, and feature work naturally pulls modernisation into the parts of the system changing most. A big-bang rewrite forces a choice between progress and cleanup; incremental modernisation does not.

Yes — AI-readiness is mostly modernisation. An AI feature is a new service that needs clean, reachable data and a clear place in the architecture to attach to. A tangled legacy system has neither, which is why AI bolted onto one produces a demo that falls apart with real users. We do the groundwork — a clean data access layer, an architecture with room for a service, observability, and the testing discipline evals depend on — so an AI feature can attach cleanly and hold up. From there our AI Engineering team can build the feature itself. Modernisation is the foundation; the AI work sits on top of it.

We modernise across the stacks we build on every day — on the front end, older React and JavaScript codebases brought current, and migrations such as Create React App to Vite or Pages Router to App Router; on the back end, PHP and Laravel, Python and Django, Node.js, and WordPress; and the infrastructure underneath, from hand-built setups to reproducible infrastructure as code. We also handle language and runtime version upgrades, including older Python and PHP versions. If you are not sure whether your stack fits, a modernisation audit will tell you plainly.

Yes — this is common modernisation work, and the early steps are designed for exactly it. When the original authors are gone and nobody fully understands the code, we do not start by changing things. We start by observing how the system behaves in production and writing tests that capture what it does today. Those two activities rebuild the lost understanding from the outside, safely, before any modification. You do not need someone who remembers the original design; we make the system’s real behaviour visible and protected first, then modernise.

Both. Some clients want a modernisation programme plus a genuine handover — documentation, test patterns, architecture decisions written down, your engineers paired in — so their own team carries it forward. Others want an ongoing modernisation retainer: a steady allocation of senior engineering time that keeps the system from ageing back into legacy, with dependency updates, incremental refactoring, and upgrade debt cleared continuously. Software keeps ageing, so a retainer is how a system stays modern rather than drifting back. We are happy with either, and we always leave your team stronger, not dependent on us.