What if an agency has let me down before?

Then you should be wary, and we’d rather you made us prove it. Most agency horror stories come down to a handful of failures: the price kept moving, the code wasn’t yours, nobody senior checked the work, or the team went quiet. LaunchPad gives each of those a fixed answer.

The failures we hear about, and what we do instead

And if Discovery doesn’t leave you confident in the plan, you get your money back. Why should I trust you with this budget and timeline? covers that promise properly.

None of this depends on goodwill. It’s how the product is priced and structured.

Being locked in is the one that hurts most

The most damaging story we hear isn’t a missed deadline. It’s a founder who discovers they don’t own their product. The code sits on the agency’s private platform, or in the agency’s accounts, and leaving means starting again.

That’s why ownership is settled from day one with us. During the build, accounts and hosting sit with us or with you, whichever you prefer. At launch, they’re yours either way. An AWS setup is a whole AWS account, run under our AWS Control Tower, which can be moved out to you. Do I own the code and IP? has the detail.

If your current project is stalling

Don’t fire the agency first. Secure what you can before anyone gets defensive:

1. Get every account into your company’s name. That means the code repository, hosting, domain, app store accounts, signing keys, databases and services like Stripe.
2. Ask for a written handover, and pay what’s fairly owed.
3. Get an independent audit of what’s actually been built. The free architectural review is one way to get a second opinion.
4. Ignore what you’ve already spent. That money is gone either way. The only question is what the next pound buys.

Then decide whether to fix, replace piece by piece or rebuild. Our guide to taking over a stalled project walks through each step, including why AI has made rebuilding cheaper than it was.

We’ve picked up where others left off. Electragram handed us its guest platform mid-season, with live events for hosts like Founders Forum still running. A founder introduced through Envestors arrived with a stalled offshore build, and the first stage of ours was working in twelve days. Can you take over an app another agency built? explains how a takeover works.

Is it them, or is it the brief?

It’s worth asking yourself. Projects also stall when the direction keeps changing or decisions take weeks. A new team inherits that pattern unless something changes.

Discovery is partly there to catch it. It forces the scope, the priorities and the decisions into the open before a line of production code is written. What happens if I’m slow with feedback or decisions? explains what that means for your side.

The bit that went wrong after launch

Plenty of agencies vanish the week the app goes live, which is exactly when the first real bugs turn up. We don’t. TotalCare covers the hosting, app store accounts, third-party services and support for a fixed monthly fee. You get on with the business; we keep the lights on.

What being burned should teach you

Use the experience. Whoever you hire next, us included, ask who exactly does the work, and when the accounts move into your name. Ask whether the price is fixed, and what happens if they go quiet. A good supplier answers every one without hesitating.