Technology Advisory
Independent technical guidance for decisions that are expensive to get wrong — build versus buy, platform strategy, architecture reviews, and platform modernization — from a team that also happens to build software.
How We Can Help
Some of the most consequential decisions in a product's life aren't engineering tasks — they're judgment calls: keep building on the platform you're on or move off it, build something yourself or buy an existing tool, invest in modernizing now or wait another year. This is advisory work: we assess, lay out the real options, and hand you a clear recommendation and the reasoning behind it, whether or not you ever hire us to build anything after.
What We Do
Key capabilities.
Technology Strategy
Technology Roadmaps & Strategy
A technology plan aligned to your actual business goals and timeline — not a generic best-practices document, but a sequenced plan specific to what you're trying to build and how fast.
Technology Selection & Build vs. Buy
A structured comparison of building something yourself versus using an existing platform or tool, based on your specific requirements and total cost of ownership, not a generic pros-and-cons list.
Architecture & Scalability
Architecture Reviews
A review of your current or proposed architecture against your real scale requirements, flagging what will hold up, what won't, and what's being over-engineered for a scale you're not at yet.
Scalability & Performance Strategy
A plan for the specific bottlenecks that will show up as you grow — database load, third-party rate limits, infrastructure cost — worked out before they become an incident.
Platform & Technology Audits
Platform Health & Technology Stack Review
A structured review of your existing platform’s architecture, performance, and security posture, resulting in specific, prioritized findings rather than a generic checklist with no context for your actual system. Our free Platform Audit tool automates the first pass of this.
Technical Due Diligence
Codebase, architecture, and team assessment for investors or acquirers evaluating a software business, delivered as a clear report on what's solid, what's risky, and what it would cost to fix.
Platform Modernization
Platform Modernization Assessment
Your business has grown past what your platform can comfortably do — whether that’s Sharetribe, Shopify, WordPress, WooCommerce, CS-Cart, Arcadier, another SaaS tool, or a custom system built a few years ago. We assess what’s actually limiting you and lay out the real options, in order of preference: extend it, reconfigure it, integrate around the gap, migrate to something else, or build custom — because rebuilding is rarely the cheapest or fastest answer.
Replatforming & Migration
When a platform genuinely needs to change, we plan the migration to protect what already works — existing URLs and SEO rankings, transaction history, customer data — so modernizing doesn’t mean starting the business over.
AI Readiness
AI Opportunity & Architecture Assessment
An honest assessment of where AI could realistically help your product or operations, plus what data, infrastructure, or process gaps need closing before any of it will actually work.
AI Readiness Roadmap
A sequenced plan for closing those gaps — the data cleanup, integration work, or process changes that need to happen before an AI feature can ship reliably, not just get demoed.
When You Need This
Signs it's time.
You're deciding whether to build a platform yourself or use an existing one, and the wrong call is expensive
You’re an investor or acquirer who needs a technical read on a software business before closing
Your current platform has become restrictive, difficult to extend, or expensive to maintain
You want an honest AI readiness assessment before committing budget to an AI initiative
ACE's Approach
We give the recommendation the evidence supports, including when that means telling you not to migrate yet, not to build something custom, or not to invest in AI this year. Advisory only holds up if it's independent of whether we get hired afterward — so the report you get is the same whether you build with us next or not.
Why ACE
Why ACE for Technology Advisory
Our advisory guidance comes from teams that actually ship software across marketplaces, SaaS, mobile, and AI — not from consultants who've only ever written the recommendation and handed it to someone else to execute. That's the difference between a roadmap that sounds right and one that's actually been tested against real builds.
What We Deliver
Written architecture or technology assessment
Build-vs-buy or platform comparison with cost analysis
Platform modernization options: extend, reconfigure, integrate, migrate, or rebuild
Prioritized findings & recommendations
AI readiness roadmap
Follow-up review session to walk through findings
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