Legacy PHP rescue · US · UK · Canada
Hire CodeIgniter Developers
Start with a two-day audit and a written answer to the only question that matters: patch it, upgrade it, or migrate it. Engineers in India who have done all three, four hours of daily overlap with EST, and your IP assigned from the first commit.
- Ten working days risk-free
- Real tickets in your tracker. Walk away at the end and owe nothing.
- IP assigned on day one
- Yours on commit, not on final payment. An assignment clause, not a licence.
- NDA before repository access
- Yours or ours, signed before anyone joins your GitHub organisation.
- Four hours of EST overlap
- Standup at 9:00am your time, written handover before your morning.
- Replacement inside five days
- At no cost, with a paid week of overlap for handover.
- Thirty days’ notice to stop
- Month to month after the trial. No annual minimum, no exit fee.
1 CodeIgniter specialist free within four weeks
The real question
Patch it, upgrade it, or migrate it
Nobody hiring a CodeIgniter developer is really shopping for a developer. These are the three answers, with the timeline and the honest risk of each. The two-day audit tells you which one is yours, and what it will cost.
Stay on CodeIgniter 3
Security patches, PHP 8 compatibility shims and nothing else. The app keeps earning while you decide.
- TIMELINE
- Ongoing retainer
- DOWNTIME
- None
- THE RISK
- CI3 gets security fixes only. Every PHP release widens the gap, and the hiring pool shrinks each year.
Upgrade to CodeIgniter 4
Controllers, models and libraries rewritten to CI4 namespaces. Same framework family, so your team keeps its knowledge.
- TIMELINE
- 8-16 weeks
- DOWNTIME
- None. Runs in parallel
- THE RISK
- CI4 has a far smaller ecosystem than Laravel, so more of what you need gets written by hand.
Migrate to Laravel 12
MOST CHOSENModule by module behind one router: the strangler pattern. Never a big-bang rewrite.
- TIMELINE
- 14-28 weeks
- DOWNTIME
- None, cut over per module
- THE RISK
- Highest up-front cost, and it needs product decisions from you along the way.
We have argued clients out of migrations twice this year. If the answer is "leave it alone and patch it", that is what the report will say, and it will have cost you two days rather than a quarter.
Book the auditBefore you spend anything
How bad is it, really?
Five things we check first on every inherited CodeIgniter application. If you recognise two or more, the audit is worth more to you than a developer is.
Send us read access to the repository and we will run these checks ourselves. No form, no call first: a reply with what we found inside one business day.
No test suite, and deploys happen over FTP
Start with the audit, not a migration. You cannot safely change what nothing verifies.
Running PHP 7.4 or older
This is a security exposure today. The PHP upgrade comes before any framework decision.
The developer who built it has left
Two days of documentation and a runbook will save more than two months of guessing.
Custom libraries in application/libraries doing framework work
This is where the real migration cost hides, not in the controllers.
It handles billing, bookings or stock
Strangler migration, module by module. Never a rewrite, whatever anyone quotes you.
Engagement models
Four ways to buy CodeIgniter time
Pick by how much certainty you need. Every model is the same engineers, the same review standards and the same published rate.
Hourly
The audit, a single patch, or a PHP compatibility fix. Billed in 15-minute blocks.
Priced on the rates pagePart-time
Eighty hours a month, enough to keep a CI3 app patched and shipping small features.
Priced on the rates pageDedicated
MOST CHOSENOne engineer, full time: the model every migration runs on.
Priced on the rates pagePod
Two developers, QA and a PM. We own delivery, you own the roadmap.
Priced on the rates pageStraight answer
Migrate, upgrade, or leave it alone, how to tell
Start from the least fashionable answer: if the application is stable, earning money, and nobody needs to change it much, leaving it alone is a legitimate engineering decision. A CodeIgniter 3 app on PHP 8 with a patch retainer can run for years. Migration is not a virtue in itself, and any agency that opens with "you need to rewrite this" has told you something about their sales model rather than your codebase.
What forces the decision is rarely the framework. It is a PHP version going out of support, a dependency that no longer installs, a payment provider deprecating the API you integrated in 2016, or the one person who understood the codebase leaving. Those are the moments to spend money, and the order matters: get onto a supported PHP version first, then decide about the framework. Doing both at once is how migrations end up abandoned at sixty per cent.
When migration is right, it should never be a rewrite. We run the strangler pattern: one router in front, modules moved across one at a time, both frameworks live together for as long as it takes. Every week ends with something shipped and something deletable. A big-bang rewrite asks you to fund six months with nothing in production at the end, and to trust that the new system covers a decade of undocumented business rules. It usually does not.
One more thing worth knowing before you take quotes: the cost is almost never in the
controllers. It is in the custom libraries doing what a framework should do: a
hand-rolled ORM, a bespoke auth system, a PDF generator someone wrote in 2014. Any
estimate that has not opened application/libraries is a guess, which is
exactly why we sell two days of looking before we sell anything else.
We have talked two clients out of migrations this year. Both are still on retainer, both spent a quarter of what they had budgeted, and both sent us someone else. That is the trade we are happy with.
The alternatives
What you are actually choosing between
Marketplace and in-house figures are typical US mid-to-senior PHP ranges for 2026, including employer costs. Ours are the published rates.
Capabilities
What our CodeIgniter developers actually do
Eight things CodeIgniter owners ask us for most. Six of the eight are maintenance rather than migration, that is the honest shape of this work.
CodeIgniter 3 maintenance and security
Patches, dependency updates and PHP 8 compatibility on an application that gets security fixes from upstream and nothing more. The unglamorous work that keeps a business running.
CodeIgniter 3.1
PHP 8.xWAFBackups CodeIgniter 4 upgrades
Namespaced controllers, models and libraries, run in parallel with the old router until you switch.
CodeIgniter 4PSR-4 CodeIgniter to Laravel migration
Module by module behind one router. Every week ends with something shipped, not a half-finished rewrite.
Laravel 12 PHP 5.6 to 8.4 upgrades
Rector and static analysis first, then branch by branch with the application staying live.
Untangling custom libraries
The framework work sitting in application/libraries, replaced with Composer packages that are somebody else’s job to maintain.
ComposerPSR-4 Taking over an undocumented codebase
A written report first: what it does, what is risky, what it will cost to change. Then a runbook, a test harness around the money paths, and a deploy that is not FTP.
Feature work on a legacy app
New features on old code, with regression tests around whatever you are touching.
Performance and database tuning
Query profiling, indexing and caching on schemas that grew for a decade without one.
Redis Not sure it is worth saving?
That is a fair question and the audit answers it. Sometimes the report says rebuild, and we will tell you that even though it is the harder sale.
Tech stack
Current versions, not a wish list
What is in production for our clients this quarter. We will work in older versions too, most rescue jobs start there.
CodeIgniter & PHP
PHP 8.3 / 8.4 CodeIgniter 3.1 CodeIgniter 4.5 Composer · PSR-4 CodeIgniter 4 Laravel 12 Data & infrastructure
MySQL 8 
PostgreSQL 16 Redis 
Docker AWS · Hetzner · Forge 
GitHub Actions Quality & front end
Vue 3 
Tailwind 4 
Alpine The engineers
The people who would be on your standup
Legacy PHP is a speciality, not a punishment posting. These engineers have spent years in codebases nobody documented, and you interview them before anything is agreed.
Strangler migrations off CodeIgniter, and the patch retainers that keep CI3 secure for clients who are not moving.
CodeIgniter 3 Laravel 12 Rector Rebuilds the CI3 admin as a Filament panel, usually the first screen a migration replaces.
Livewire 3 Laravel 12 Integrations specialist, Stripe, NetSuite and three shipping carriers, all idempotent.
Stripe REST Queues Writes the regression tests that make changing a ten-year-old codebase survivable.
PHP 5 more engineers, with full profiles, shipped work and GitHub history. Meet the whole team →
How we work
What a CodeIgniter engagement includes by default
Legacy work has its own defaults, because the risk sits in different places than it does on a new build.
Risks, effort, and what to fix first. Nobody can price work on a codebase they have not read.
On any parallel-running migration this is week one. Until sessions are solved nothing else can be tested properly.
Ported queries can return subtly different results without throwing an error. Tests against the existing system are what catch that.
The strangler pattern. Risk moves out of one cutover day into small reversible steps, each deployable on a Tuesday afternoon.
An unsupported framework on an unpatched PHP is a live exposure. That gets fixed whether or not you decide to migrate.
If the application works, earns, and nobody needs to change it, a patch retainer costs a fraction of a migration.
You do not have to take any of this on trust. The first ten working days are risk-free, every rate is published in full, and the work happens in your repository from the first commit.
How it works
From first email to a developer on your standup
Twelve working days end to end, and no money changes hands until you have seen the work.
- Day 0
Send us the problem
A repo link, a Jira export or three plain sentences. An engineer replies, not a salesperson, inside one business day.
- Day 1
Shortlist, with rates
Two or three profiles with real GitHub history, each carrying a rate, a seniority and the date they come free.
- Day 2
Interview them yourself
Twenty minutes with the person who will write the code. Say no as often as you like. There is no fee either way.
- Days 3-12
Ten days, risk-free
Real tickets in your tracker, standup at 9:00am ET, commits in your repo. Walk away at the end and owe nothing.
- Ongoing
Scale, hold or stop
Add a second developer at the same published rate, or give 30 days' notice. Repo, cloud accounts and IP stay yours.
Why India
Why hire CodeIgniter developers in India
This is the one place where India is not just cheaper, it is genuinely deeper. CodeIgniter was the default framework across Indian software services from roughly 2009 to 2016, which means an enormous number of production applications, and the engineers who maintained them for a decade. Finding someone in Chicago who has migrated four CI3 monoliths is hard at any price. Here it is a speciality with a hiring pool behind it.
YOUR WORKING DAY, AND OURS
- IP assignment on day one
- Everything written for you is yours on commit, not on final payment. Assignment clause, not a licence.
- NDA before repository access
- Yours or ours, signed before anyone is added to your GitHub organisation.
- Your jurisdiction, your paper
- We sign MSAs governed by Delaware, England and Wales, or Ontario law without argument.
- No lock-in, 30 days' notice
- Month to month after the trial. No annual minimum, no exit fee, documented handover included.
- Invoiced in USD or GBP, net 15
- Wire, ACH or card. One invoice a month, itemised by engineer and hours.
FAQ
Questions buyers ask before the first call
If yours is not here, email it. We publish the answer rather than saving it for a sales call.
How much does it cost to hire CodeIgniter developers in India?
Every seniority band is published in full on our rates page, and the two-day audit is a fixed fee quoted before you commit. Migration work usually needs the lead band rather than the mid one, which the audit will say plainly.
Is CodeIgniter dead?
No, and that is the wrong question. CodeIgniter 4 is actively maintained and CI3 still receives security fixes. The real risk is the hiring pool: every year fewer developers know it, so the cost of finding help rises even though the framework works fine.
Should we upgrade to CI4 or migrate to Laravel?
It depends on how long you intend to build on this application and whether your team wants to stay on CodeIgniter. The comparison above gives the honest cost of each, and two days in your codebase is what turns that into a recommendation.
How long does a CodeIgniter to Laravel migration take?
Fourteen to twenty-eight weeks for a typical business application, module by module, with both frameworks live at once. Anyone quoting six weeks has not looked at your custom libraries.
Can you keep our CI3 app secure without migrating?
Yes, and for many clients that is the right answer. A patch retainer covers dependency updates, PHP compatibility, a WAF and off-site backups, with critical fixes applied within five business days.
We have no documentation and the original developer is gone. Can you still help?
That is the most common situation we inherit. The two-day audit produces a written report and a runbook, so even if you never hire us again you own a map of your own system.
Who owns the code and the IP?
You do, assigned from the first commit rather than on final payment. Work happens in your repository and your hosting account, so there is nothing to hand over at the end.
What if the developer is not the right fit?
That is what the ten working days are for. Stop at the end of the trial and you owe nothing. After that we replace the engineer within five business days at no cost, with a paid week of overlap for handover.
How much timezone overlap do we get?
Four hours with New York, five and a half with London, and two with San Francisco. Standup is at 9:00am your time, and a written handover is in your inbox before your morning.
Do you do fixed-price migrations?
Per module, yes, that is the point of migrating incrementally. We will quote a fixed price for each module once the audit has told us what is inside it, but not for the whole application sight unseen.
Talk to an engineer
Tell us what needs building
You get a reply within one business day from someone who has migrated this exact kind of application, with a named engineer, their rate and their start date. No discovery fee, no obligation.
Ten working days risk-free before you pay
NDA signed before repository access
Or book a 20-minute call at a time you pick
We never share your details, and we do not run a mailing list.