A free introductory call — A paid engagement with a fixed scope.
5 working days of analysis, one written result, one fixed price. Afterwards you know what is slowing your delivery down and in which order it can be fixed.
The assessment is a paid engagement with a scope of its own — not a pre-sales call billed later, and not an open-ended discovery phase. We talk to your people, read your code and your pipelines, and write down what we find. On day five you get every result as files that belong to you. Whether you work with us afterwards is a separate decision.
REQUEST THE ASSESSMENTIf at least two of these sound familiar, the analysis is worth buying:
These enquiries get a no. Better you read it here than hear it after two meetings.
Six results, all written down, all in your hands on day five:
A sorted table rather than prose: every bottleneck found, with its effect, the order of magnitude of the effort, the risk of leaving it alone, and the evidence it came from — an interview, a repository, pipeline history or an incident report.
A diagram of the current state: systems, dependencies, and the path a change takes from commit to production — with the points marked where it waits instead of moving.
Key people, expiring versions and support deadlines, single points of failure, and the dependencies between teams that never appear on an org chart.
Items your team can start without us and without a budget request, each with an order-of-magnitude effort and the effect to expect. Prioritized, so the list does not get parked as a whole.
Where the platform should be in three months, in steps that can be delivered and reversed one at a time, with a named owner per step — names from your organization, not from ours.
A technical session with the team where every finding can be challenged, and a shorter version for the management or the board that states the consequence rather than the technology.
The 5 working days usually sit inside 3 weeks rather than running back to back — your team needs to keep working in between, and we want time to read between the interviews and the code.
Without these the analysis becomes guesswork. They are listed here so you know in advance what your side of it costs:
You write a few sentences about what is stuck. You get an assessment back of whether this is the right instrument — and if it is not, what would be.
One conversation to settle scope, dates and access. It is not a discovery phase and it is not billed; it establishes whether and when.
Fixed scope, fixed dates, fixed price — in writing, before the first access is granted. No change requests for days that take longer than expected.
The working days described above. Your side of the effort is bounded and known in advance: one interview per person, plus the readouts.
Every result as files you own: text as Markdown, diagrams as source, the register as a spreadsheet. Nothing sits in a portal you lose access to when the engagement ends.
Once the readout is done the engagement is complete. There is no obligation to continue and no follow-on contract in the small print. You can deliver the roadmap yourselves, deliver individual steps with us, or hand the results to another supplier — they are yours. If we think you need someone else for the next step, that goes in the report.
A fixed price for the whole scope, agreed in writing before we start. No day rate, no time-and-materials billing, no change requests.
The figure is not on this page yet. Send us your team size, your platform and where you stand — you get the fixed price back in writing, before a meeting is needed.
The bottleneck register is the core of the report. This is how it is built — one row per bottleneck, sorted by effect over effort:
| Bottleneck | Effect | Effort | Risk of leaving it | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Release approval depends on one person | Releases wait for a calendar slot rather than for finished code | M | High — if that person is unavailable, all delivery stops | Interviews 3, 4 and 7; pipeline history |
The row above is an illustrative pattern, not a client case. We do not publish results from real assessments, anonymized or otherwise.
Effort is given in orders of magnitude (S, M, L) rather than person-days: person-days estimated out of a single week of analysis would be guesses, and a guessed number in a table looks exactly like a measured one. The roadmap below it arranges the same rows into steps for the next 90 days.
The roadmap names the steps, not the supplier. If you want to deliver some of them with us, these are the services an assessment most often leads into — each bookable on its own, with nothing bundled:
No. The assessment is an engagement of its own with a fixed scope and a fixed price, and it is complete once the readout is done. There is no obligation to order anything afterwards. The results are yours, including if you hand them to another supplier to deliver.
Because 5 working days are enough to find the bottlenecks, and two weeks would start solving them. Solving is delivery, is ordered separately, and should not run quietly inside an analysis.
Matthias Bruns, founder of Appetizer Labs. There is no team it gets passed to internally: the same person runs the interviews, reads the code and writes the report.
Then that is what the report says, with the reasoning, and you have a defensible answer instead of a suspicion. We do not add items to make the list longer.
About an hour per interviewee, plus the two readouts. The named contact also spends time preparing access and scheduling — in total well under a working day, spread across the three weeks.
Remote-first; interviews and readouts work well remotely. One on-site day in North Rhine-Westphalia is included in the fixed price; outside NRW, travel is charged separately.
Either. You choose the language for interviews, report and readouts — including a mix, such as an English report and a German readout.
Read access is revoked after the readout, and shared documents are deleted or returned. The NDA and, where needed, the data processing agreement come first.
Send us your team size, your platform and what is currently stuck. You get the fixed price and available dates back in writing — and an honest no if an assessment is the wrong instrument for you.
Not sure yet whether this is the right engagement? Settle it in a quarter of an hour, with the engineer who does the work. Book a fit check
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