Most application development that gets outsourced is not greenfield. There is a running product, a customer base that notices outages, a codebase somebody else wrote, and a backlog that grew faster than the team. The hard part is not writing features. It is arriving inside a system you did not design without breaking the parts that already work.
Curiosive is a small studio in Ankara, Türkiye, with 25 products in production across 13 countries. Roughly half of that work started as somebody else's codebase. RateItAll was a legacy platform we revived, now carrying over 12 million reviews. Zing Coach was a full replatform to Next.js while its million-plus users kept using it.
Handing an application to a new team and expecting features in week one is how regressions start. We spend the first week on repository layout, deployment pipeline, test coverage, data model and the parts of the system that carry money or personal data. The output of that week is a written map of what exists and what we think is fragile. You get that document whether or not the engagement continues, so the audit has value even if you walk away.
We use your repository, your branching strategy and your review rules. No parallel island that gets merged in a lump at the end, no zip file handover. Pull requests are small enough to review, and every one is read by a senior engineer before it merges. If you have no process yet, we bring ours and hand it over documented.
AI writes the volume: scaffolding, migrations, test coverage, refactors that touch hundreds of files. Work that used to eat a sprint takes an afternoon, and the saving goes to you rather than into our margin. Engineers own the boundaries: data models, authorization, payment paths and anything touching user data are designed and reviewed by a person who has run systems like yours in production.
Türkiye sits ahead of Western Europe by a small margin and ahead of the US East Coast by a larger one. European teams share nearly a full working day. US East Coast teams get a real window in our late afternoon, their morning, so a question sent when New York wakes up is answered that day. West Coast overlap is narrower, and those engagements lean on written updates plus one call at a fixed time.
The cost that surprises people is not the invoice, it is the exit. Code you cannot read, infrastructure in an account you do not control, and a deployment nobody documented. We write typed, tested code in your repository, hosting and database accounts stay in your name, and the handover document is written as we go rather than assembled in the final week.
A finished product across web, mobile or browser extension, with the admin and integrations behind it.
Starting points, not quotes. What a project actually costs depends on scope, and we agree that in writing after discovery.
Yes, and most of our work starts that way. The first week is an audit rather than delivery: we read the codebase, the pipeline and the data model, then give you a written assessment of what is solid and what is fragile. You keep that document regardless of what you decide next.
Small pull requests, senior review on every merge, and load testing before anything touching a hot path ships. On Zing Coach we replatformed to Next.js while more than a million users kept using the product, which is only possible if changes go out in slices rather than a single cutover.
You do, from the first commit. Development runs in your repository, hosting and database accounts stay under your control, and the ownership clause is agreed before work begins rather than negotiated at the end.
Ongoing application work runs on the retainer at $800 per month for 20 hours. Larger builds start from $10,000. We scope in writing with a price and a timeline before anything is committed, so you decide with numbers in front of you.
There is no long contract to begin. The code is already yours, it is already in your repository, and the handover notes are already written, so ending the engagement is an email rather than an extraction project.
One paragraph on what you are building, roughly when you need it, and who it is for. No brief, no form with fifteen fields.
From the engineer who would do the work, not a sales team. If we are not the right fit we say so, and where possible we point you somewhere better.
Scope, price and timeline in writing before anything is committed. You decide with the numbers in front of you.
No long contract to begin, no lock-in to our tooling, and the code is yours from the first commit.
Start a conversationA short note about the product, the timeline and who it is for is enough to start. You will hear back from the engineer who would do the work, not a sales team.
Ankara / Türkiye · Working across European and US time zones
