In the spring of 2025 a researcher scanned 1,645 apps from Lovable's public showcase and found that 170 of them, about one in ten, let anyone read or write their database tables with nothing more than the public key, because row-level security had never been switched on (CVE-2025-48757; a readable account of the scan). Lovable disputes the CVE and argues that each customer is responsible for protecting its own data. Both readings lead to the same place: somebody has to own that responsibility before real users arrive, and the tool that wrote the app will not.
That gap has become a market. In 2026 a founder with an MVP built in Claude Code, Cursor, Lovable, Bolt, v0 or Replit can buy «vibe code rescue» from dozens of firms, from a solo engineer selling a fixed-price audit to agencies with a hundred people. This guide compares five of them. We review these codebases for a living, so here is the disclosure up front: Conectia is one of the five. The other four are headquartered in the United States, publish a service page dedicated to exactly this job, and were checked against their own sites in October 2026. Each profile says when that firm is the better call than us.
A production-ready rescue fixes the system around the code, not the screens
Before comparing vendors, fix the standard. When we take over an AI-built MVP, the screens almost always survive. What is missing is the system around them, and any firm worth hiring should deliver all of it:
- Authorization enforced at the data layer: row-level security or server-side checks, not hidden buttons.
- Secrets out of the repository, and every key that was ever committed rotated.
- Production separated from everything else, with no agent holding write access to live data.
- A reproducible build: pinned dependencies, one command to run, CI that fails on a failing test.
- Tests on the paths that move money or data: sign-up, payment, permissions.
- Observability and a cost ceiling: request logs, error tracking, and a hard cap on what the LLM layer can spend.
- A written specification and context files (
CLAUDE.md,AGENTS.md) so the next change, by a human or an agent, does not undo the previous fix. - The repository and the cloud account in your company's name, not the vendor's.
What breaks in an AI-built MVP, and the order to fix it goes through the first seven in detail. Use the list as a test: ask every vendor below which of the eight their first engagement delivers, and in writing.
Five companies that take AI-built MVPs to production, side by side
The order is alphabetical, which happens to put us first. Ignore that and read the columns.
| Company | HQ | Best for | First step | Who does the work | Published price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Conectia | Barcelona, Spain | A founder who wants the rescue and the next six weeks of product from one senior team | Two-week Diagnostic & Blueprint: a written verdict per module, read-only audit, architecture and a written plan | Senior engineers contracted directly, CTO-led vetting (about 3% pass) | Diagnostic & Blueprint at a fixed price, listed on our pricing page and deducted from the MVP; the rescue is quoted after the Diagnostic & Blueprint |
| Intellectsoft | New York, NY | Companies that want a staged rescue with formal sign-offs, especially LLM-heavy products | One-week code audit, then three days of recovery scoping | Agency team; offices in the US and the UK | Not on the service page |
| ISHIR | Dallas, TX | Teams that will keep coding with AI and want guardrails as well as a cleanup | Risk and architecture assessment | Onshore leadership in Texas; engineering in India and Latin America | Not on the service page |
| metaCTO | Los Angeles, CA | Funded US startups with paying users that want a US team and a fixed price | Free 48-hour code audit and rescue plan | US team; the firm says it runs no offshore centres | $50,000–150,000 per rescue, fixed after the audit (source) |
| MEV | Walnut Creek, CA | Regulated data, health above all, while the founder keeps building in the original tool | Production-readiness audit with a rebuild-or-refactor call | 100+ people; engineers in the US, Costa Rica, Armenia, Georgia and Europe | Not published; scoped per engagement |
Where each of the five is the better call
Conectia: best when you want one senior team for the rescue and what comes after. We are a CTO-led team run from Barcelona, and we put senior engineers on startup products who are contracted directly, not pulled from a marketplace. Each one passes a vetting round led by a working CTO, live pair programming included, and about 3% of applicants get through. The first step is a Diagnostic & Blueprint: two weeks to audit the repository read-only, fix the architecture and write the plan, which you can execute with us, with your own hire or with the agent that wrote the first version. After that, an MVP goes to production in six weeks. The match is direct, one engineer for your context, with a 30-day guarantee and a replacement within seven days if it does not work. Our stack is deliberately narrow: Node.js and TypeScript, Python, AI systems and DevOps. When we are not the right call: your app is Rails, PHP or a native iOS client; you need a team in your own US time zone (from Barcelona we overlap with US mornings, not afternoons); or you handle health records under HIPAA, where MEV has published more specific work.
Intellectsoft: best for a staged rescue with written sign-offs. Headquartered in New York, Intellectsoft sells Vibe Code Rescue as a five-stage process: a one-week audit, three days of recovery scoping, an eight-week rescue, two weeks of stabilisation and handover, then optional ongoing support. Its stack list is heavy on AI infrastructure (LangChain, LlamaIndex, Langfuse, RAGAS, vector databases), which makes it a fit when the fragile part of your MVP is a RAG pipeline or an agent, not the CRUD around it. Not the pick when you need to be live within a month: the published stages add up to roughly three months.
ISHIR: best when your team will keep coding with AI. A Dallas firm founded in 1999, ISHIR runs a Vibe Coding Cleanup Service that goes from risk assessment through architecture realignment, refactoring, tests, documentation and CI/CD hardening, and ends with «AI-safe development guardrails»: playbooks so your developers can keep using AI tools without rebuilding the mess. Cleanup is phased so the product stays live. Product leadership sits in Texas; engineering runs from India with nearshore support in Latin America. Not the pick when your problem is specific to a builder: the service page names no tools, so ask for Lovable or Supabase experience directly.
metaCTO: best for a US startup that wants a fixed price and a US team. Based in Los Angeles, metaCTO's Vibe Code Rescue starts with a free 48-hour audit of your repository (security, architectural debt, hallucinated APIs, rescue versus rebuild), then a fixed-scope plan, then senior engineers who take the codebase to production in 30 days. It names Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Lovable, v0, Bolt, Replit Agent and Windsurf. It is also the only firm here that publishes the price of the rescue itself: $50,000 to $150,000 per rescue, and it says plainly that it is not a fit below about $40,000 or for products without users yet. Not the pick when you are pre-revenue or the budget sits below that floor.
MEV: best for regulated data and founders who are not ready to stop building. MEV has been in business since 2006 from Walnut Creek, California, and its Vibe-Code to Production service has the most distinctive model of the five: you keep building in Replit, Lovable or Bolt while MEV runs a parallel production track on AWS, with every change passing a pull-request gate on a one-to-two-day cycle. Hardening goes in a stated order (authentication, secrets, data integrity, observability, performance) and covers the LLM layer too: spend caps, rate limits, prompt-injection defences. It publishes a HIPAA checklist for vibe-coded apps and a case moving a Base44 healthcare app to AWS. Not the pick when you only need one bug fixed: MEV's own guide says a small boutique can be cheaper for a one-off patch.
You may not need any of them, and that is a legitimate answer
The strongest objection to this whole category comes from the numbers above: nine in ten of the apps in that scan were not exposed by that particular flaw. If your MVP has no paying users, stores nothing sensitive and exists to test demand, keep building it with the tool that got you here. A rescue before you have users is money spent on an asset that may not survive the next pivot, and metaCTO, to its credit, turns those projects away.
The second objection is about size. A one-person studio selling a fixed-price audit for a few hundred dollars is a real option when the problem is narrow, a misconfigured Supabase policy for instance; the Lovable and Supabase walk-through shows how far a founder can get alone. The firms in this guide earn their fee when the problem crosses layers at once: the data model, the auth, the deploy and the LLM bill.
Four questions decide which firm fits
- Do real users or real data depend on it today? If not, wait. If yes, the audit comes before any feature.
- Will you keep building in the original tool? If yes, MEV's two-track model or ISHIR's guardrails fit. If you are leaving the builder behind, pick a firm that will write the specification the MVP never had.
- Where must the team sit? A US-only contract or a West Coast schedule points to metaCTO. A European data perimeter or a senior team that overlaps with both Europe and US mornings points to us.
- What does the first step deliver in writing? Hold it against the eight-point list above. Whatever the vendor, the audit report and the repository should stay yours even if you never sign the second phase.
The demo proved demand; production is a contract with your users
An AI-built MVP has already done the hard, expensive thing: it showed that someone wants the product. What it has not done is make a promise to those people about their data, and that promise is the actual product of a rescue. Every firm in this guide can deliver it. Choose by who has to be in the room, how fast you need to be live and what the first week puts on paper.
If the codebase is Node, TypeScript or Python and you want the rescue and the roadmap from the same people, this is the team we put on startup products.
Questions founders ask before hiring a vibe code rescue firm
How much does it cost to take a vibe-coded app to production?
Few firms publish prices. Among the companies in this guide, only metaCTO publishes the price of the rescue: $50,000 to $150,000 for a fixed-scope rescue after a free audit. We publish the fixed price of the Blueprint and quote the rescue once the Blueprint is done. Smaller boutiques publish fixed audits from a few hundred dollars and hardening sprints from a few thousand. The honest variable is the codebase: how many tables lack authorization rules, whether the data model matches the business, and whether the deploy works anywhere except the founder's laptop.
Should I rewrite the AI-built MVP or rescue it?
Rescue first, almost always. The UI and the flows usually survive, and the data model survives at least as documentation of what the business needs. A full rewrite throws away the one thing the MVP proved. Our keep-versus-rewrite test comes down to three questions about the data model, the request path and the framework.
Can I keep using Lovable, Cursor or Claude Code after the rescue?
Yes, if the rescue leaves behind what the first build lacked: a specification, context files the agent reads, CI that blocks a failing change and a production environment the agent cannot touch. A rescue that leaves none of that will need doing again in three months.
