If You Need Someone to Fix and Ship an AI-Generated App for Real Users
The right partner is a senior design and engineering team that audits the code and architecture first, fixes the security, data and UX faults in priority order, and hands back a product you fully own, on a fixed scope and timeline. At Provel, that's our Product Rescue Sprint: a one-to-two-week engagement from $4,000 in which the two people who scope the work also do the work.
The pattern is familiar by now. A founder builds an app in Lovable, Bolt, Cursor or Replit over a few weekends. It looks finished. Investors nod at the demo. Then fifty real users sign up and the thing falls apart: a query times out, someone sees another user's data, the mobile layout breaks at the payment step, and nobody on the team can explain what the code is actually doing. Below is how we take exactly that kind of product from working demo to something you can safely put in front of real users and real investors, inside a fixed-scope sprint with a fixed price.
Why the demo works and production doesn't
AI coding tools optimise for the happy path in front of one user. They are very good at it, which is exactly why the failure surfaces late. The problems are structural rather than cosmetic:
- Public-by-default data. Backends-as-a-service like Supabase and Firebase are secure only when access policies are written. AI builders often skip them. A 2025 third-party scan of 1,645 Lovable-generated apps found 170, roughly one in ten, with fully readable databases (CVE-2025-48757). Lovable later changed its defaults to enable row-level security, but apps already shipped stayed exposed until their owners fixed them by hand.
- Secrets in the client. API keys, service-role tokens and RPC credentials pasted into frontend code because that was the fastest way to make the feature work.
- Vulnerable code at scale. Veracode's 2025 GenAI Code Security Report tested output from more than 100 LLMs and found 45% of generated code samples introduced security flaws — larger, newer models did not do better. Assume yours contains some of them until a scan says otherwise.
- Screens that forget each other. Each generated screen is coherent alone; the journey between them isn't. Onboarding drifts, navigation dead-ends, empty and error states were never designed, and keyboard or screen-reader users cannot get through at all.
- Architecture that fails at sign-up number 200. Unindexed tables, N+1 queries, no caching, no rate limiting, one server doing everything, and cloud spend that scales faster than users do.
- No owner. Nobody on the team can read the code confidently, so every change is another prompt and another regression.
None of this means the prototype was a mistake. It got you to a demo, a waitlist and a conversation with investors faster than a traditional build would have. It just means the prototype has done its job, and the next job is different.
What "production-ready" means in our sprints
"Production-ready" gets thrown around loosely, so we use a concrete checklist. Every finding in our audits is scored Critical, High, Medium or Low.
| Area | Production-ready means |
|---|---|
| Security | Auth, sessions and API surface reviewed; secrets out of the client and rotated; dependency audit clean of known criticals; penetration test passed; data access policies enforced. |
| Data | Schema fits the product it now is; indexes on every hot query; slow queries rewritten; resilience and failover reviewed. |
| Performance | Slow queries and render-blocking work fixed; SSR, caching and CDN in place where they pay off; load tested at 10× current traffic. |
| UX | Every core flow mapped end to end, with empty, loading, error and success states designed; mobile usable at the money moments (sign-up, checkout, wallet connect, transaction confirm). |
| Accessibility | WCAG 2.1 AA pass: contrast, focus order, keyboard navigation, ARIA and screen-reader flows. |
| Infrastructure | Deployment pipeline, separated environments, monitoring and alerting, sensible cloud costs, a clear path to scaling. |
| Ownership | Full source in your repo and your cloud account, documented architecture, keys handed over, no proprietary layer between you and your product. |
The sprint, end to end
A Product Rescue Sprint is fixed scope, 1 to 2 weeks, from $4,000. Here's how a two-week rescue can run — the exact split depends on what the audit finds.
Before day one: a call and access
A free 30-minute call about the product, who you're trying to convince (users, investors, a launch partner), and what's already gone wrong. If a rescue isn't the right instrument, we say so on the call. When it is, we agree scope in writing, sign an NDA if needed, and get repo access, hosting and database dashboards, analytics, and design files. We don't need you to explain the code — reading code nobody fully understands is the point of the first phase.
Days 1-3: audit, severity-scored
Engineering and design work in parallel. We read the codebase and architecture, run vulnerability scanning and a dependency audit, review auth, sessions, API design and secrets handling, and run penetration testing against the deployed app. We profile the database for slow and unindexed queries and check behavior under load. Design walks every core flow as a new user, on desktop and mobile, with a keyboard and a screen reader. The output is a single prioritised list, scored the same way as our audits, agreed with you before the remaining sprint days start. Critical findings — exposed data, leaked secrets, broken payments — are raised the moment we confirm them, not held for a report.
Days 3-8: fix in priority order
- Moving secrets server-side, rotating exposed keys, locking down data access policies
- Patching or upgrading vulnerable packages, with a roadmap for upgrades that need more care
- Adding indexes, rewriting queries that time out, introducing caching and a CDN where the numbers justify it
- Splitting a tangled codebase into modules a future engineer (or AI assistant) can safely change
- Redesigning and rebuilding the flows that lose users, including the states the prototype never had
- Where scope allows, a deployment pipeline, separate staging/production environments, and monitoring (full CI/CD and infra builds are Build Sprint territory)
Because the person who designs a flow also writes the code for it, there's no handoff and no translation loss. You see progress at each checkpoint and give feedback then, not at the end.
Days 8-10: verify and hand over
We re-run scans and penetration tests, load test at a multiple of current traffic, re-walk flows for the WCAG 2.1 AA pass, and check the cloud bill against the new architecture. Then: full source in your repository, deployment in your own cloud account, documented architecture, keys and credentials transferred, and a walkthrough of what changed and why. Anything outside scope leaves with you as a roadmap, no obligation to do it with us.
Fix or rebuild: how we decide
Not every AI-generated prototype should be rescued. Sometimes the fastest route to a fundable product is to treat the prototype as a detailed specification and build the real thing. We make that call as early in the audit as the codebase allows: if the data model and core architecture can carry the product to its next milestone, we fix; if they can't, patching them buys weeks, not years.
| Audit | Product Rescue Sprint | Build Sprint | |
|---|---|---|---|
| When it fits | You want an independent, severity-scored view before committing to fixes | The architecture can carry the product; it needs hardening and UX repair | The prototype proved the idea but can't be safely extended |
| Duration | 5 business days (Lite) to 4 weeks (Pro) | 1 to 2 weeks | 4 to 12 weeks |
| Price | $4K to $19K fixed | From $4,000 | From $12,000, 50% upfront |
| You get | Severity-scored findings and quick wins; Pro tiers add a criticality matrix and 30/60/90-day roadmap | Fixed, hardened product in your repo plus a roadmap for anything out of scope | Full-stack product, auth, database, integrations, CI/CD, infrastructure, QA and launch support |
An audit suits founders with live users and a board who want an independent view before committing budget to fixes; a rescue suits a demo that's already breaking. Both paths end with the same definition of done.
What changes when the app is Web3
Most of our portfolio has a wallet, a token or a contract somewhere in the stack, and AI-generated Web3 apps have failure modes of their own: private keys or RPC credentials in the frontend, contracts deployed from a prompt with no test suite or upgrade path, wallet-connect flows that work in one browser extension and nowhere else, transaction confirmations that give users no idea what they're signing, Sybil-vulnerable airdrops, and gas costs that were fine for a test wallet and ruinous for a real audience.
For Slingshot, a gaming ecosystem with 3.2M+ monthly active users, we built a custom Arbitrum Orbit L3 with Web3Auth and Safe account abstraction that onboarded 5,000+ Web2 users at zero gas, cut more than $5k/month in on-chain spend, and migrated from Polygon with zero downtime, with externally audited contracts. For Lizard Labs we delivered a fully audited staking and vesting platform on Mainnet and Base that passed $1M+ in tokens staked, and the brand, deck and product UI that helped close a $4.4M seed round. In a Web3 rescue, contract review, key management and transaction UX join the standard checklist rather than replacing it.
Why fixed scope, and what we won't do
Fixed scope is a discipline for us as much as a comfort for you. A time-and-materials engagement on a messy codebase has no natural end; a fixed sprint forces the severity scoring, the prioritisation and the honest conversation about what fits. Some things we deliberately don't do inside a rescue: we don't add features (a rescue makes what exists safe and usable, not bigger); we don't rewrite for the sake of taste (code that's ugly but correct and testable stays); and we don't hand back a product on our infrastructure or behind our tooling — everything lives in your accounts from day one. Every project is handled at lead level by our two co-founders — Michael Lawless on design, Julien Atanasyan on engineering — backed by a Dubai-based team averaging ten years of commercial experience.
After the sprint
A hardened product still needs someone watching it. Many founders continue on a Maintenance Retainer (from $3,000/month, three-month minimum, pausable after that) covering security patches, dependency upgrades, monitoring, monthly technical reviews and architecture advisory as the product grows. Others take the handover, hire, and never need us again — both are fine outcomes, since the code and documentation are written so either works.
If your prototype convinces people in a demo and disappoints them in production, book a 30-minute call or email hello@provel.co with your repo link. We'll tell you in that half hour whether it's a fix, a rebuild, or something you can handle yourself.