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 helps UK SMEs fix what nobody understands anymore, and leaves your team stronger than we found it.
A full day on your problem, then a written plan in your inbox within a week. Real time one-to-one with the person who actually makes the decisions, plus time with your team and your code, then we go away and think, properly, before we tell you what we'd do.
One-to-one time with the decision maker / product owner
Code walkthrough + time 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 on purpose, it pays for the prep and the write-up, and filters timewasters. You get a real plan, not a sales pitch.
Bespoke/ let's talk
Sounding Board
The senior on tap. A monthly retainer of Darren's time, used flexibly: architecture calls, code review, second opinions, small fixes, “is this vendor any good?”. Shape and price depend on cadence and access.
A quiet way to keep the senior close. We'll agree shape and price together.
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
Discovery Day → 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. £750 is enough to keep this serious on both sides.
Probably not. We work best with SMEs: founders, ops directors, people who make the decisions themselves. Epona is a small consultancy, my wife and I, with trusted senior devs on tap when a job needs more hands. That means you get senior attention without agency overheads.
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 discovery day 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.
