Section 1
Version path
Every Rails and Ruby step from where you are to current, in the order they have to happen, and which ones can ship to production on their own.
Rails upgrade assessment
Know what your Rails upgrade will cost before you start it.
In five business days we read your codebase and hand you the version path, the blockers in each step, and a fixed quote for the whole upgrade. You decide what to do next with real numbers.
- A written report your team can act on, with or without us
- A fixed price for the upgrade, with no hourly estimate attached
- Done by a principal engineer with twelve years in Rails
Where you stand
Find your Rails version
Once a version leaves security support, new vulnerabilities in it are published but never patched. Auditors, insurers and enterprise customers ask about exactly this.
| Rails | Security fixes | Ended or ends | Upgrade steps to 8.1 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8.1 | Supported | Oct 10, 2027 | You're current |
| 8.0 | Ended | Nov 7, 2026 | 1 |
| 7.2 | Ended | Aug 9, 2026 | 2 |
| 7.1 | Ended | Oct 1, 2025 | 3 |
| 7.0 | Ended | Apr 1, 2025 | 4 |
| 6.1 | Ended | Oct 1, 2024 | 5 |
| 6.0 | Ended | Jun 1, 2023 | 6 |
| 5.2 | Ended | Jun 1, 2022 | 7, plus the Ruby 3 jump |
Dates from endoflife.date/rails, checked November 11, 2026. Not sure which version you run? Look for the rails (x.y.z) line in your Gemfile.lock.
The report
What you hold at the end of the week
One document, written for the person who has to approve the budget and the engineer who has to do the work.
Section 2
Gem blockers
Each gem that stops a step: abandoned, pinned, forked or incompatible. For each one, the replacement or the patch.
Section 3
What is really pinning you
Old apps are rarely stuck on Rails itself. It's usually an asset pipeline, a search cluster or one internal library. We name it.
Section 4
Test coverage gaps
Where your tests would catch an upgrade regression and where they wouldn't, mapped to the code the upgrade touches.
Section 5
Risk register
The things most likely to go wrong, ranked, each with how we'd detect it and how we'd roll back.
Section 6
Fixed quote and timeline
One price for the whole upgrade, broken down by step, with a calendar. Valid for 60 days.
How it runs
Five business days, about an hour of your time
Before day 1
Paperwork and access
A 20-minute call, a mutual NDA, and read-only access to the repository. We don't need production or customer data.
Days 1–2
Read and run
We get the app and its test suite running, then inventory versions, gems, deprecations and coverage.
Days 3–4
Trial upgrade
We attempt the first version step on a branch to see what breaks. That turns the quote from an estimate into a measurement.
Day 5
Report and call
You get the written report, then a 45-minute walkthrough with whoever needs to hear it. The trial branch is yours to keep.
Why trust the quote
A 21-application HR SaaS platform
Hundreds of client organizations, a 12-gem internal library, and two engineers. Our principal led the fleet from end-of-life versions to current Rails in under six months, without a rewrite.
21applications and 12 internal gems upgraded
4,600CoffeeScript and Hamlc files converted to ES6
52%→89%test coverage across the fleet, before the risky work
500+high and critical security alerts resolved
rails 5.1 → 5.2 → 6.0 (zeitwerk) → 6.1 → 7.0 → 7.1 / 7.2 · ruby 2.4–2.6 → 3.x (keyword args) → 3.2 / 3.3
The method is public. Rails Modernization Skills is the open-source toolkit behind that project, and the same tooling runs your assessment.
Questions
Before you book
Do we have to hire you for the upgrade?
No. The report is written so your own team, or another firm, can follow it. If you do hire us within 60 days, the $1,500 comes off the upgrade price.
What does the upgrade itself usually cost?
It depends on how many version steps you're behind, how much of the app is covered by tests, and what is pinning you. That is why we quote after reading the code and not before. The quote is one fixed price, not an hourly range.
What access do you need?
Read-only access to the repository, plus whatever is needed to run the test suite locally. We sign an NDA before we see any code, and we don't need production access or customer data.
Do you use AI tools on our code?
Yes. Agent tooling does the inventory and the repetitive conversion work, and a senior engineer verifies every finding before it goes in the report. We tell you exactly which tools will touch your code before you grant access.
We have several apps. How does that work?
The price is per application. Apps that share internal gems or a common base are cheaper to assess together, so tell us how many you have and we'll quote the set.
Our tests are thin. Is the assessment still useful?
That is the most common situation, and it changes the plan more than anything else. The report says where coverage has to come up first, and the upgrade quote includes that work.
Book the assessment
Tell us what you're running
Send the form and we reply within one business day with a time for the 20-minute call. No sales team: you talk to the engineer who does the work.
We work with US teams on Eastern time, Monday to Friday.
Heartwood Software · Western New York · remote across the US
Prefer email?
hello@heartwoodsoftware.com