Hire · Time-critical · Production-down
This is the time-critical hiring path. If production is down right now — payments broken, auth bypassed, white-screen on every route, runaway credit burn, or active data loss — you do not have a week to compare agencies on a marketplace. Same-day diagnostic, 48-72 hour fix sprint, money-back if we cannot resolve your issue. For non-urgent or multi-month engagements, see the broader path on the pillar page for hiring a base44 developer.
Short answer
If your base44 app is broken in production, we respond same business day, ship a fix in 48 to 72 hours, and refund if we can't. This is the time-critical hiring path: same-day diagnostic, 48-72 hour fix sprint, written incident report at close. Three urgent sprint slots are reserved every week for production-down situations — payments broken, auth bypassed, white-screen, runaway credit burn, active data loss. Pricing is fixed and the same as our scheduled work: $497 audit, $1,500 fix sprint, $3,000 multi-bug rescue. Money-back if a sprint cannot resolve your issue. One named senior engineer end-to-end. If your situation is not time-critical, the multi-month or one-off-decision paths are better fits.
Severity gate
Picking the wrong severity tier wastes money on premium scheduling or delays a fix that should have shipped this morning. Match your scenario to the row below. P0 means revenue-blocking right now; P1 means degraded but contained; P2 (not listed here) means schedule it inside a normal week.
01
App fully unreachable, white screen on every route
Function routing or platform-level outage — diagnose first, fix in a same-week sprint.
P0
Playbook02
Stripe payments stopped after platform update
Webhook handler signature changed — restore inside a 48-hour sprint.
P0
Playbook03
Auth broken — users locked out or SSO bypassable
Header-manipulation bypass is a known platform default. Patch and audit logs.
P0
Playbook04
Records vanish on reload — silent data loss
State-persistence regression. Recover, prevent recurrence, write the regression test.
P0
Playbook05
Credits draining hundreds per trivial edit
AI-agent regression loop or context-window overflow. Stop-the-bleed fix in a sprint.
P1
Playbook06
Backend functions return 404 in production only
Route registration is stale — documented platform behaviour with a playbook.
P1
Playbook07
App returning 429s under production traffic
Rate-limit throttling at scale. Identify hot routes and re-architect calls.
P1
Playbook08
Stored XSS or token theft active in the wild
Security incident. Patch, rotate tokens, write the incident report.
P0
Playbook09
Customer paid via Stripe but Base44 never granted access
Webhook, signature, or session-cache failure. Patch the customer first, root-cause second.
P0
Playbook10
RLS rules drifted after an AI builder edit — wrong tenant data leaking
Silent permission bug. AI builder skipped the policy update. Build the coverage matrix and lock it down.
P0
PlaybookSymptom not on the list? See the full triage guide or browse the 25 documented base44 fix playbooks.
Response SLA
Most agencies advertise "rapid response" without committing to a clock. Below is the actual SLA we hold ourselves to on urgent intake — from the moment your form arrives, through the fix, to the post-ship handoff.
T+0 to T+2 hr
A senior engineer responds inside two business hours, schedules a 15-minute intake call, and confirms severity tier. NDAs sign same-call.
T+1 business day
We reproduce in your workspace, identify root cause, and ship a written diagnostic with a prioritised remediation plan. This is the audit deliverable.
T+48 to T+72 hr
Sprint runs against the prioritised list. Daily status updates. Code peer-reviewed by a second engineer on auth, payments, and data-touching changes.
T+72 hr onwards
Three-paragraph change summary, regression watch list, and an open Slack/email line for 14 days post-ship. Free reproduction if the same issue resurfaces inside that window.
Coverage
Standard urgent: Monday through Friday, 9am to 6pm Eastern. The two-hour acknowledgment SLA applies inside this window. Requests landing outside the window are acknowledged at 9am the next business day.
After-hours
Active P0 incidents only: revenue-blocking outages and security incidents in progress qualify for after-hours response. Flag "after-hours emergency" on the intake form. We do not run a 24/7 rotation and will say so honestly rather than over-promise.
Why a specialist
01
We have shipped 100+ base44 apps and seen every documented platform bug — function routing breaks, credit-burn loops, AI-agent regressions, SSO bypasses, webhook dead-letter regressions. The first ten minutes of an audit usually narrow root cause to one of three known patterns. A generalist freelancer often spends two days reproducing.
02
Three urgent sprint slots are reserved every week and never back-filled with scheduled work. When you trigger urgent intake, you are not in a line behind eight build projects — a slot is already waiting.
03
If a bug-fix sprint cannot resolve your issue — typically because the root cause is a platform-side bug we cannot work around — we deliver the diagnostic and refund the sprint fee. Marketplaces have no such guarantee. You eat the cost when the gig fails.
04
You know which engineer is on your engagement, their LinkedIn, and the apps they have shipped. The engineer who scopes the work is the engineer who ships it. No mystery accounts, no undisclosed offshore hand-offs mid-emergency.
05
Every shipped fix lands with a written change summary and a regression watch list. So when base44 ships a breaking platform update six months later, you have a paper trail and a checklist — not a forgotten Slack thread and a fresh debugging session.
06
Same fixed-price scopes — $497 audit, $1,500 sprint, $3,000 multi-bug — whether your engagement is scheduled three weeks out or starts tomorrow morning. Urgency does not change the price.
What you get
All three are fixed-price. All three start the same business day for confirmed P0 emergencies. Multi-bug rescue is the right tier when more than one system has broken at once.
TIER
$497
USD · Fixed-price · One engagement
One business day. Reproduction in your workspace, root-cause identification, written remediation plan. Refundable against any fix engagement.
Scope
TIER · RECOMMENDED
$1,500
USD · Fixed-price · One engagement
48-72 hour sprint to resolve a single high-impact issue. One urgent slot held weekly. Money-back if not resolved.
Scope
TIER
$3,000
USD · Fixed-price · One engagement
Up to eight related defects fixed in a single 1-2 week engagement. Right when more than one system has broken at once.
Scope
For ongoing emergency coverage — priority access to urgent slots, monthly regression checks, and a dedicated Slack channel — see the base44 expert services retainer tiers. If you are not yet sure the work is urgent and want a written stay-or-fix recommendation first, the base44 consultant path is the cheaper place to start. Comparing vendors before you commit? See the base44 agency framing.
How it works
Step 01
Three-field intake: workspace URL, what is broken, and your deadline. Flag "urgent" on the urgency selector.
Step 02
Senior engineer confirms severity, signs the NDA, and either opens an audit or starts a sprint depending on the diagnosis gap.
Step 03
Workspace review, root-cause identification, written remediation plan. The audit is the gating deliverable before any sprint code lands.
Step 04
Sprint runs, peer-reviewed code lands, regression tests pass, written summary delivered. Open line for 14 days post-ship.
When NOT urgent
We try to disqualify ourselves on the intake call when the work is genuinely not urgent. Mis-tiering wastes a held slot another operator needs. Three patterns where a scheduled engagement is the right answer.
Worried something is off ahead of launch but no production users are blocked. Schedule a $497 audit inside the next two weeks; sprint follows the audit. The right product is the production audit, not an urgent slot.
Adding a Stripe checkout flow, a new dashboard, or any non-broken feature is not an emergency. Scope it as a build — see the build tiers — and ship to a two-week schedule.
Single-day copy changes, layout tweaks, or static-content updates do not justify an urgent sprint. A top-rated Fiverr seller closes that work for $50-$200 — see the Fiverr comparison for the boundary.
What we ship in 48-72 hours
Time-critical work fails when scope is fuzzy. Below is the line-by- line list of what lands in your workspace and your inbox by the end of an urgent sprint — same six items every time, regardless of severity tier.
Item 01
Documented steps to reproduce the bug in your workspace, including the input data, the user role, and the network or platform conditions that trigger it. So if the bug recurs, you or your future engineering hire have a starting point.
Item 02
Three to six paragraphs naming the underlying defect — function routing, webhook signature drift, RLS regression, AI-agent edit, platform behaviour change — and why this code path regressed. Cited to specific files or platform features.
Item 03
Code changes deployed to your base44 workspace on a feature branch you control. Peer-reviewed by a second engineer for any auth, payments, or data-touching changes before merge.
Item 04
A short checklist of the manual or automated tests that would have caught this bug before it shipped. So when the next platform update lands, you have a playbook to run instead of discovering the regression in production again.
Item 05
A three-paragraph summary of what changed, why, and what to watch for on the next platform update. Goes in your knowledge base or PR description; survives Slack thread amnesia.
Item 06
An open Slack or email line for 14 days after the fix lands. Free reproduction and re-fix if the same defect resurfaces inside the window — no second invoice, no second intake call.
Pricing + money-back terms
The four operational facts every buyer asks before triggering urgent intake. Written here so the engagement letter holds no surprises.
Term 01
Same prices as scheduled work: $497 audit, $1,500 single- issue sprint, $3,000 multi- bug rescue covering up to eight related defects. No hourly billing on urgent intake.
Term 02
The $497 audit fee is fully credited toward any sprint or rescue booked off the back of the audit. So the audit-then-sprint path costs the same as a standalone sprint while delivering both deliverables.
Term 03
If the root cause is a platform-side bug we cannot work around, we ship the written diagnostic, file the issue with the base44 team, and refund the sprint fee in full. You keep the audit deliverable. You are never billed for code that did not ship.
Term 04
Audits are paid up front via Stripe so work can begin same-day. Sprints invoice 50% on engagement-letter sign and 50% on shipped fix. ACH and wire are available for finance teams that cannot bill via card; allow one extra business day to clear before sprint kickoff.
QUERIES
Every urgent request is acknowledged inside two business hours during weekday working hours (9am-6pm Eastern, Mon-Fri). A diagnostic call is scheduled inside the same business day. The audit deliverable lands in one business day; the fix sprint typically begins inside 48 hours and ships in 48 to 72. We hold three urgent sprint slots open every week so genuine production emergencies do not wait behind scheduled work.
Production-down, payments-broken, auth-bypassed, active data loss, runaway credit burn, or an active security incident (stored XSS, token theft) all qualify as P0 urgent. Performance regressions, intermittent bugs affecting a subset of users, and pre-launch concerns are P1 or P2 — fixed inside a normal sprint slot the same week. We tell you the severity tier honestly on the intake call, not after billing.
Pricing is the same fixed-price scopes as our scheduled work — there is no urgent-rate surcharge. A diagnostic audit is $497, a single-issue bug-fix sprint is $1,500, and a multi-bug rescue covering up to eight related defects is $3,000. The audit fee is refundable against any fix engagement. We do not bill hourly, and there is no premium for same-week scheduling.
Standard urgent response is 9am-6pm Eastern, Monday through Friday. After-hours and weekend coverage is available on a case-by-case basis for active P0 incidents (revenue-blocking outages, security incidents in progress) — flag 'after-hours emergency' on the intake form and we will respond inside four hours if an engineer is available. We do not run a 24/7 on-call rotation, and we will tell you that upfront rather than over-promising.
If the root cause is a platform-side bug we cannot work around, we deliver a written diagnostic with reproduction steps, file the bug with the base44 team, and refund the sprint fee. The audit fee covers the time to identify that. You are never billed for a sprint that did not ship a working fix.
Yes. Mutual NDAs are standard and execute in under an hour through our intake. We can join the workspace as a collaborator, work on a forked branch, or operate strictly via screen-share if your security policy requires it. Code and customer data never leave the engagement scope, and we follow whichever access policy your team prefers.
Marketplace generalists spend the first day reproducing the bug — for a base44-specific issue, that day is what kills your revenue. We have shipped 100+ base44 apps and have seen every documented platform failure mode (function routing, credit burn, AI-agent regressions, SSO bypasses). Most urgent engagements close inside the first hour once we reach the workspace. Money-back if a sprint does not resolve it; that guarantee is not available on any marketplace.
After a successful first urgent engagement we offer monthly retainer coverage that includes priority access to urgent slots, monthly platform-update regression checks, and a Slack channel for triage. Pricing depends on app size and SLA needs — quoted after the first engagement closes.
Buyer FAQ
Beyond the FAQ schema above, three questions show up consistently on intake calls when the request is genuinely time-pressured. The honest answers are short.
Question 01
For diagnosis, yes — by a wide margin. A panic in-house hire takes two weeks of recruiting, two weeks of onboarding to the base44 platform, and another week to reproduce the bug. We acknowledge in two hours and ship the diagnostic in one business day. For ongoing daily product work after the emergency closes, an in-house engineer is faster because they live in the workspace — most clients use us for the first one or two emergencies and hire in-house once they understand the platform. The JD template is free when you are ready.
Question 02
For acknowledgment and the intake call, yes. For paid sprint work, the bar is the audit — we do not start a sprint without a written reproduction and a remediation plan, because that is the difference between a fix that holds and a hot-patch that regresses inside a week. The audit lands inside one business day; the sprint begins immediately after. If the issue is so small the diagnosis is obvious from the screen-share, we skip the audit and start the sprint on the same call.
Question 03
We do not run a 24/7 on-call rotation, and we will tell you that on the intake form. For active P0 incidents — payments down right now, security incident in progress — flag "after-hours emergency" and an engineer will respond inside four hours if available. If 24/7 coverage is a hard requirement for your business, the right move is hiring an in-house on-call engineer, not contracting an agency. We will refer rather than over-promise.
Common urgent fixes
Each row links to the public playbook page for that bug. The playbook covers reproduction, root cause, the workaround, and the in-place fix. Most urgent inbound traffic matches one of these twelve patterns within the first ten minutes of the audit.
Backend · P0
Functions return 404 in production
Payments · P0
Stripe webhook dies after platform update
Auth · P0
SSO bypass via header manipulation
Data · P0
Records vanish on app reload
Credits · P1
Trivial edits burn hundreds of credits
Backend · P1
Functions stop working after hours
Performance · P1
429 rate-limit throttling at scale
Security · P0
Stored XSS leaking session tokens
AI agent · P1
AI-agent regression loop breaks code
SEO · P1
CSR-only app invisible to Google
Integrations · P1
Webhooks fire only with active users
AI agent · P1
Context window overflow loses state
Auth · P1
White screen + 405 after first login
Integrations · P1
Base44 + Supabase users / plans drift
Payments · P0
Customer paid but Base44 never grants access
Security · P0
RLS drift after an AI builder edit
Browse the full list of 29 documented base44 fix playbooks, read the triage guide if you are not sure which one matches your symptom, or get a Base44 AI builder audit if your bug followed an AI builder edit.
NEXT STEP
Submit the urgent intake form. A senior engineer responds inside two business hours, signs the NDA, and confirms severity on a 15-minute call. Money-back if a sprint cannot resolve your issue.