The senior picks up. Every time. No account managers, no juniors-in-training.I'm Darren. Nearly 40 years untangling legacy software for banking, healthtech, wealth management, PropTech and the NHS. Epona is the specialist established mid-sized companies bring in for the critical system nobody understands anymore, and we leave your team stronger than we found them.
Built by people who've long since moved on. Releases are a held breath, changes take days, and the knowledge to fix it fast walked out with them.
ii.
Shadow AI, no guardrails
Your team is already using AI, unofficially and unlogged. The upside is real, but so is the data and compliance exposure, and nobody owns the guardrails.
iii.
The six-figure rebuild
An agency has quoted six months and a team of four, and the board wants the number justified. There's usually a sharper, staged route that doesn't bet the year on a big bang.
Free · No email required
Software Health Check
Five questions on where the risk actually sits, then an honest first read from a senior pair of eyes. No email, no follow-up unless you ask.
Where does the real risk sit in your software estate?
1 / 5
How we work together
Start with an assessment. Then keep us close.
Three rungs, each a natural step up. Start free with the health check above if you'd rather test the water first. You only commit to the next when you're ready.
£1,500/ 1 day + written plan · ex VAT
Assessment
A full day on your problem, then a written plan in your inbox within a week. Time one-to-one with the people who make the decisions, time in your code and architecture, then we go away and think, properly, before we tell you what we'd do.
One-to-one with the decision maker and product owner
Code and architecture walkthrough with your team
Written plan delivered within 5 working days
Costed, sequenced, and honest about trade-offs
Yours to use, with us, without us, or with someone else
Priced to pay for the prep and the write-up, and to filter timewasters. You get a real plan, not a sales pitch.
Most picked
from£1,600/ day · ex VAT
Engagement
The build itself. Fixed-scope where the work can be pinned down, day rate where it cannot. We take the highest-leverage problem, ship it in weeks, and pair with your team so they own it long after we have gone.
Fixed-scope or day rate, agreed up front
Legacy rescue, architecture, and safe AI adoption
Weekly shipping, visible progress, no sprint theatre
Paired with your team so capability stays in-house
Most engagements run a few weeks to a few months. Remote-first, on-site where it earns its keep.
from£4,000/ month · ex VAT
Fractional Principal
The senior on tap. A standing share of Darren's time each month, used flexibly: architecture, code and vendor review, technical due diligence, the hard calls. For teams who want the expertise close without a permanent hire.
Around a day a week, shaped to you
Architecture, code review, technical due diligence
Lighter-touch advisory available from £2,500 a month. We agree shape and scope together.
Get your team AI-ready
Rather we taught your team?
You've read the headlines and watched your people quietly experiment. These sessions turn that into something safe, useful and yours, without betting the business on hype.
£1,500/ half day · ex VAT
Leadership Briefing
Half a day with your leadership team or board, cutting through the noise. Where AI genuinely moves the numbers, where it is a distraction, and what is safe to adopt in a regulated or data-sensitive business.
Pitched at decision makers. In person, or over video anywhere.
Team favourite
£2,000/ half day · up to 10 · ex VAT
Team Workshop
Half a day that turns your team from cautious to capable. We build the session around your actual work, not toy demos, and leave you with prompts, guardrails and a way of working your team will use on Monday morning.
Priced per session, not per head. In person, or over video anywhere.
Bespoke/ multi-week
Embed Programme
Deeper than a workshop: recurring sessions plus hands-on pairing on your real backlog, so AI-assisted working becomes a habit your team keeps rather than notes they forget. Runs alongside or inside an engagement.
Shape and price agreed together, sized to your team and backlog.
How it works
Weeks, not months. Visible, not vapour.
You'll see progress every week. I send a short Friday note: what shipped, what's next, what I'm stuck on. No sprint theatre, no status decks.
"If I can't show you something real by Friday of week two, I'm doing it wrong."
Day 0
Take the Health Check
Five minutes, no email required. You get a plain-English read on where you stand. If something rings true, you write back and tell us a bit more.
Week 1
Assessment → plan
A full paid day on your problem. We read your code, sit with the decision maker, and leave you with a written plan you can act on, with us, without us, or with someone else.
Week 2
Read the landscape
We dig into the code, the data, the history. We'll tell you what we find: good, bad and tangled. If you've got in-house devs, they're in the room with us.
Week 3–5
Ship the first fix
We pick the highest-leverage thing and build it, pairing with your team where we can, so they own it afterwards. Tested, documented, working.
Week 6+
Keep shipping, or stop
Retainer if there's more to do. Clean handoff if there isn't. Either way your team leaves stronger than we found it.
What this looks like in practice
The kinds of problem we take on. Three shapes.
Real engagements, described by sector rather than client. Different shapes, same through-line: the software ends up better understood, and the in-house team ends up stronger than it started.
01
PropTech · Legacy monolith
~16 months
UntangledThe codebasestored procedures to clean architecture
The codebase everyone tip-toed around.
Before
A .NET monolith that had become, in practice, a wall of stored procedures and triggers. No tests, no documentation, no-one still there who fully understood the logic. Every release was a held breath.
What we did
Stabilise the worst performance pain first to buy breathing room. Wrap the system in black-box tests against sanitised production data so behaviour is pinned down before anything moves. Decompose into a modular architecture, piece by piece, with the business running on the old version throughout.
Outcome
A codebase the in-house team can now change without fear, a DAL that performs under load, and a clear route for them to keep eating the elephant on their own after we're gone.
KeptThe clientswho were ready to walk out the door
The architecture that kept clients from leaving.
Before
A flagship product with long-standing performance issues, an AngularJS frontend showing its age, and significant clients threatening to leave. A product team that needed a credible next-generation story, fast.
What we did
Define the target architecture end-to-end, hardware integration, frontend, federated GraphQL, microservices, infrastructure, reporting, and write a vertical slice through it so nothing stays theoretical. Deliver an MVP of the at-risk product to a hard deadline. Recruit and shape the team that will own it.
Outcome
The at-risk clients stayed. A modern architecture in place with the team structure and ways of working to run it. The in-house team leaves this engagement with more capability than they started, not less.
ZeroDefects at go-liveone chance, right first time
The migration that had to be right first time.
Before
A legacy Lotus Notes estate that had to move to SharePoint inside a non-negotiable window. No second attempt, if it failed, it failed in front of the whole business.
What we did
Build a purpose-made C# migration utility, not a script. Model every document type and edge case the old system had accreted over the years. Dry-run against sanitised data until the report is boring, then run it for real.
Outcome
Zero defects. An uneventful go-live, the highest compliment a migration can get. Everything the team needed to run similar moves themselves afterwards.
C# / .NETLotus NotesSharePointData migration
In their words
The sort of thing colleagues say when you're not in the room.
He doesn't just tell you what a solution should be; he actually builds it as a proof of concept. You always get an honest, real-world view of the challenge.
Healthcare, via LinkedIn
He is the one to go to if you want to solve problems. A key reference for everybody in the team. Having him in the team means success.
Healthcare, via LinkedIn
Questions you probably have.
If yours isn't here, email me directly and I'll answer it straight.
Two reasons. First, it means the day is genuinely useful. I come prepared, read your setup beforehand, and deliver a real written plan, not a sales pitch. Second, it filters out tyre-kickers, the people who want a free hour to pick a senior brain. At £1,500 it stays serious on both sides, and the plan is yours to keep whatever you decide next.
Established mid-sized companies with software that matters: the system the business runs on, or the one a regulator cares about. Usually a CTO, engineering lead or MD who needs a specific hard problem solved, not another agency to manage. You get a senior specialist directly, with trusted senior devs on tap when a job needs more hands. No account managers, no bench of juniors learning on your time.
Often yes, just in a different way. We're happy pairing with in-house devs, upskilling them on AI and modern patterns, and leaving them stronger than we found them. We're not trying to replace your team, we're trying to make them faster.
No. Most clients come to us with a frustration, not a spec. The assessment is where we turn 'something's wrong' into 'here's what we'd do about it.'
Some of it. Plenty of it isn't. The useful question isn't 'should we use AI'; it's 'where would it save us 20% of a specific job, safely and auditably.' Usually the answer is one or two places, not fifty.
You do. All the bespoke work Epona writes for you is yours outright, assigned to you on delivery, clean, documented, in your repos. We lean on permissive open-source libraries (MIT, Apache 2.0, BSD) so you can fork, audit or walk away whenever you like. Some of those libraries Darren maintains himself, which means faster fixes, not vendor lock-in. Licences flagged up front. No black boxes.
TypeScript, React, Node, .NET/C#, Python, Rust. Darren's nearly four decades span most eras of software, including the inherited-from-someone-else kind.
Let's untangle it.
Take the quiz, book a call, or just email me. The first two are instant. The third I reply to within a day.
