It happens more than the industry admits. You paid 50% upfront, the early calls were great, week three something felt off. Now it's been ten days and the WhatsApp messages have all gone unread. Your launch date is in two weeks. Your investor is asking when the site will be live.
This post is the playbook for the next seven days. None of it is fun, but all of it is recoverable.
Day 1: Secure your accounts
Before anything else, log in to every account you handed over and change the passwords. In order:
- Domain registrar (GoDaddy, Namecheap, Google Domains)
- DNS provider (Cloudflare, your registrar's nameservers)
- Hosting (Vercel, Netlify, AWS, your shared host)
- GitHub or GitLab (transfer ownership of the repo to your account if you can)
- Email accounts on the domain
- Google Analytics, Search Console, Tag Manager
- Stripe, payment processors
- Any third-party APIs (HubSpot, Mailchimp, Sendgrid)
If your developer registered things in their name, this gets harder — see Day 4.
Day 2: Document everything
Open a Google Doc. Paste in:
- Original contract or proposal (or screenshots of the conversation if no contract)
- Every payment, with date and amount and payment method
- Last five messages between you and them, dated
- What was promised vs what was delivered, line by line
- Last commit date in your repo (if you have access)
This is your evidence pack. You'll need it whether you go to consumer court, dispute a credit card charge, or just send a formal recovery email.
Day 3: Send the formal email
One email, in writing, with read receipts on. Don't WhatsApp this. Tone: professional, not emotional.
Template structure: state the contract terms, state what was paid, state what was delivered, state what wasn't, give a 72-hour deadline to respond. End with "if I don't hear back by [date], I'll proceed with [next step]." Specifics matter — vague threats get ignored, dated deadlines get responses.
Day 4: Recover what you don't own
If your developer registered the domain in their own name, this is the hard part. Each registrar has a disputed-ownership process. Be ready to provide proof of payment for the domain itself, the original purchase order, and any communication where the developer agreed it was yours.
If they hold the only copy of the code, contact the platform host directly (Vercel, GitHub, etc.). Most have account-recovery flows where ownership can be transferred with sufficient proof of payment and a legal basis.
Day 5: Get a salvage assessment
If you have the code, send it to a senior developer for a 2-hour assessment. Two questions:
- Is what's been built reusable, or does it need to start over?
- What's the gap between what exists and what was supposed to ship?
The answer is one of three. Salvageable: 60–80% complete, code is clean, another senior can finish in 1–2 weeks. Partially salvageable: design is usable but the code is a mess, salvage the design, rebuild the code (faster than starting from a blank canvas, especially with a 10-day rebuild process). Total restart: code is unusable, design is generic, accept the loss and start over with someone reliable.
Day 6: Pick the path forward
Three options, ranked by speed:
Option A: Hire someone to finish. Fastest if your project is salvageable. Hardest part is finding a senior who'll inherit someone else's mess — most will refuse or charge a premium. Look for builders who explicitly do rescue work.
Option B: Rebuild from scratch with a tight scope. If your launch deadline is hard, this is often faster than negotiating a rescue. A focused 10-day rebuild beats six weeks of debugging someone else's code. Pick a model that fits your bandwidth.
Option C: Fight for recovery. Consumer court, payment dispute, public review. Worth it if you've lost a meaningful sum (₹1 lakh+). Not worth your time if you've lost ₹15K and your launch is in two weeks. Move on, ship the site, file the complaint in parallel.
Day 7: Lock in the new builder
Whoever you hire next, three non-negotiables:
- Written contract with deliverables, milestones, and payment tied to milestones (not 100% upfront).
- You own all accounts. Domain in your name. Hosting in your name. Repo in your account.
- Public portfolio. Live URLs, real client names if possible. The cheapest builders are usually the least visible — that correlation is real, and avoiding it is cheap insurance.
How to never be here again
The single best preventive measure is paying in milestones. Standard structure: 50% to start, 50% on launch. Anyone who insists on 100% upfront is signaling something. Walk.
The second best: a clear written brief. Most ghosting starts when the developer realises mid-project that the scope they quoted doesn't fit the project they took on, and they freeze. A real brief catches that on day one.
If you've just been through this and you're staring at a half-built site with a launch deadline, send us a one-line message. We've inherited six of these projects this year, all shipped in 10 days or less.