Ghost Architect™ is the pre-engagement codebase triage tool that agency owners use to bid with confidence, protect margin, and ship without surprises. The audit you would have paid a senior engineer two weeks to do, in an afternoon, for under five dollars.
It is almost never the team's fault. The team executes. The problem is upstream: somebody scoped a contract on a codebase nobody had ever read. The estimate was a guess wrapped in confident language. By the time engineering opens the repo, the price is locked, the timeline is signed, and the only variable left is margin.
The math is brutal: a single misscoped engagement can eat the profit from three correctly scoped ones. And the bid-side problem compounds. The senior engineer who would have caught the issue during scoping is on three other engagements. The architect with the relevant expertise is fractional. The codebase is fifty thousand lines of someone else's PHP. The scoping call is Thursday. The proposal is due Friday.
So the proposal goes out the door with a number that came from comparing this engagement to the last engagement and rounding up by twenty percent. Sometimes that works. Forty-two percent of the time it does not, and the margin disappears before the kickoff call.
Ghost Architect™ exists to close that gap. Same scoping engineer, ten times the speed. Repeatable. Auditable. Cheap enough to run on every prospect.
Most agencies can answer two of these on a good day. By the time they can answer the rest, they have already signed the contract, scoped the engagement, and lost margin on the first sprint. Ghost Architect™ answers all eight in an afternoon, for the cost of a coffee.
A Ghost Pro subscription costs ninety-nine dollars a month. A Team subscription is three hundred ninety-nine dollars a month for five seats. A single avoided misscope pays for either tier for years. Most agencies see ROI on the first engagement they scope with Ghost.
Every engagement you bid on costs you scoping time. Senior engineers at one hundred fifty to two hundred dollars an hour. Architects at two-fifty plus. Multiply by the bids you lose. Ghost Architect™ runs a full triage scan in under ten minutes for cents, then produces a PDF you can hand to a sales engineer or read yourself.
Forty-two percent of agency engagements run over on sprint one. The most common cause is upstream: scope was wrong because the codebase was unknown. Ghost surfaces the unknowns before the SOW is signed, when you can still adjust pricing, scope, or walk away.
Walking into the scoping call with a Ghost Architect™ report changes the conversation. You are not estimating in the abstract. You are pointing at specific findings, specific files, specific risk levels. Prospects close faster on agencies that show their work. Your bid stops being one of three guesses. It becomes the bid that knows.
An Inheritance Audit deliverable that used to take a senior engineer two to four weeks now takes about sixty seconds of compute time. The PDF is client-ready. Stack reality, key-person risk, end-of-life dependencies, ninety-day modernization roadmap. Hand it to the buyer the same day they ask.
Run Ghost before the engagement. Run it again at the midpoint. Run it at the end. Use the Compare and Dashboard modes to show the client exactly which findings closed, which got worse, and which were introduced. Renewal conversations become data conversations.
Ghost Pro and above ship with Ghost Partner™ profiles. Load a YAML config and every report carries your firm's logo, your firm's brand colors, your firm's methodology in the executive summary. The deliverable looks like an audit your firm did. Because it is.
An agency wins a $120,000 Adobe Commerce migration. Three months of work, two senior developers, scope estimated from a forty-five minute scoping call and a quick repo walkthrough. Pretty standard. Here is what happens with and without a pre-engagement Ghost scan.
Notice what changed. The Ghost-scoped engagement bid $12,000 higher because it knew what it was bidding on. The third-party module rewrite was found during scoping, not sprint two. The PHP deprecations were flagged before the kickoff call. The CSRF gap was a line item, not a surprise. And the agency walked into the engagement with a forty-thousand-dollar margin instead of an eight-thousand-dollar one.
This is not theoretical. This is the math that runs every agency engagement, just usually with the second column hidden because nobody ran the analysis upstream.
You know which engagements are profitable and which ones bled. You have signed contracts you wish you had not. Ghost is the analyst you would hire if you could afford to. Ninety-nine dollars a month, on every bid, with no margin-of-error issue.
Your billable rate is high. Your time is the bottleneck. Ghost is leverage. Run the scan, review the findings, write the executive summary, deliver the engagement. Charge for the judgment, not the typing. Ten times the throughput, same firm rate.
Your senior engineers are the bottleneck on every scoping call. Ghost runs the first pass so they only weigh in on the findings that matter. The practice ships proposals faster. The senior engineers stop being a single point of failure on bids.
Margin is the number you watch. Ghost Team is five seats, three hundred ninety-nine a month, with shared project history across the firm. Every scoping call gets a triage report. Every senior engineer reviews findings instead of generating them. Margin holds.
Your differentiation is judgment. Ghost makes your judgment look like a service, not an opinion. The Ghost Partner profile loads your methodology into every scan. Clients hire you for the framing, not the report. The report comes with the engagement.
Inheritance Audit mode is built for you. Sixty seconds, two cents, deal-grade PDF. Stack reality, key-person risk, hidden dependencies, ninety-day modernization roadmap. Compare across portfolio companies with Dashboard mode. Ghost Architect Enterprise is built for portfolios.
ghost in a terminal, point it at a folder, pick a scan mode. There is nothing to install for your team beyond an npm package. There is no dashboard to log into. There is no workflow to adopt. The deliverable is a PDF you hand to whoever needs to read it. Most of the time, the people who use Ghost are you and one or two senior engineers, not the whole team. That is fine. The output is what matters.Try Open free, forever. Move to Pro when you start scoping client work. Move to Team when more than one architect is running engagements. Move to Enterprise when you need MSA, NET-30 billing, or dedicated time with the founder.
Cancel anytime. No contracts on Pro or Team. Full pricing breakdown →
Install Ghost Open free on npm and run a scan against any prospect codebase in the next ten minutes. If the deliverable looks like something your firm should be running on every engagement, the upgrade path is one click.