“A freelancer built your app, left, and now every small change takes a month or breaks something”

We take these on regularly. The first two weeks are a paid read-through: we get the code running locally, write down what it does, list the places where it is dangerous (secrets in the repository, no backups, payments without idempotency, that kind of thing) and estimate two options: stabilise and continue, or rebuild the core and migrate the data.

Sometimes the honest answer is to keep the app and fix the top five problems. Sometimes a rebuild on a boring stack is cheaper than the next year of patches. Either way you get the decision in writing with numbers, and the code ends up in a repository you own with a deploy anyone can run.