Engineering for systemsthat resist change.
Antegrate helps companies untangle, modernize and extend business-critical software without blindly rewriting everything.
Software becomes expensive when a change has to cross too many boundaries.
You are probably somewhere here
- 01
A change that sounds small
comes back estimated in quarters
- 02
A partner, market or regulation
has nowhere clean to go
- 03
Integrations fail quietly
and customers find them first
- 04
Deployment is manual
and one person can run it
- 05
Systems that should talk don’t
so people move the data by hand
- 06
A rewrite has been proposed
and everyone is quietly terrified
None of these is a crisis. That is precisely why they get deferred — and deferral is how a system that merely became expensive to change eventually becomes one that cannot change at all.
We diagnose the problem and then build the solution.
Strategy firms will analyse your system and hand you a document. Development shops will build what you specify. Neither is much use when the actual problem is that you know what outcome the business needs and it is not obvious what should be built.
Three kinds of work
A single problem can cross more than one of these. Systems that have become hard to change are rarely broken in a single layer.
- Most legacy systems do not need a rewrite.
- Framework age is not a reason to modernize. Change cost is.
- Moving a bad architecture to the cloud gives you a bad architecture in the cloud.
- Systems that fail silently are not stable.
- Automation is not a strategy if the underlying integration is broken.
- Code nobody needs to modify is not costing anything.
The cost of change
Nothing is on fire. What changed is the price of change.
Most systems that need this work are not failing. They are processing orders, serving customers and generating revenue, and have been for years. That transition is almost invisible until a specific request makes it obvious.
Paths a change must travel
20
How an engagement works
What the assessment includes- 01
A conversation about the system, not a proposal
Describe what you have and what is making it difficult to change. We will tell you whether this is work we are the right firm for — including when it is not.
- 023 weeks
Technical Systems Assessment
A bounded diagnosis with a written, decision-grade output that works for both a CTO and a CFO. It carries no implementation credit, because it is meant to stand on its own.
- 03
Implementation
Follows the plan the assessment produced, in phases with defined scope. Dorian remains accountable for architecture, significant technical decisions and acceptance throughout.
- 04
Where the assessment is not the right instrument, we skip it
If the problem is well understood and scoped, there is no reason to pay for a diagnosis of something you already know.
The work is the proof
Read a complete assessment.
Every section, at the depth we write to. A seven-year-old .NET order platform, three brittle integrations, a manual release process, and a partner integration priced at five months against a six-week expectation.
It concludes: do not rewrite the platform. Then it prices the alternatives against each other and recommends against several pieces of work that could have been sold.
The company is invented. The standard of work is not.
Technical Systems Assessment
Example
Northwind Industrial Supply — Order Management Platform
Why does the Meridian partner integration cost five to seven months when it was expected to take six to eight weeks? The estimate is approximately correct, and the reason it is correct is the finding of this assessment.
| Patch into existing pipeline | $66K |
| Seam + Meridian + stabilization | $119K |
| Full platform rewrite | $1.65M–$3.4M |
Recommendation: do not rewrite the platform.
- Legacy modernization
11 min read ·
Why rewriting a legacy system is often the wrong first move
An old system’s value is its behaviour, not its code. What a rewrite has to rediscover, what it leaves unchanged, and what to do before committing to one.
- Cost of change
7 min read ·
Seven signs your software has become too expensive to change
The symptoms that show a system has stopped absorbing change cheaply, what tends to cause each one, and what to measure before deciding what to do.
- Legacy modernization
8 min read ·
How to modernize a legacy system without rewriting it
A practical sequence for incremental modernization: find where change costs, make failure visible, pin down behaviour, then replace piece by piece.
When we are the wrong firm
We would rather tell you now than three emails from now.
You need hands on a backlog
Antegrate takes ownership of a problem, a system or an outcome — not a seat on your board.
You are building a new product from zero
Greenfield with no existing system is a different discipline, and there are firms better suited to it.
You need two applications connected and nothing more
Real work, wrong firm. It sits below the level where this makes economic sense for either side.
You need guaranteed round-the-clock response
We are deliberately small and will not sell response-time commitments we cannot reliably honour.
You are running a formal enterprise procurement
Vendor onboarding, security questionnaire cycles and insurance thresholds carry an overhead a practice this size cannot absorb honestly.
Lowest price is the primary decision criterion
There will almost always be a cheaper quote. If minimizing upfront cost matters more than technical ownership, Antegrate is unlikely to be the right fit.