The 5 Architecture Red Flags That Kill a Deal in Diligence

Buyers do not reject architectures for being unfashionable. They reject architectures that make future cost unpredictable. The distinction matters, because most sellers spend their preparation defending design choices no acquirer objected to.

What actually triggers a reprice

• A shared database that every service writes to directly
• Deployment paths that cannot be reproduced without one specific person
• Customer-specific forks maintained in parallel branches
• Authentication and permissions logic duplicated across surfaces
• Infrastructure created by hand and never captured in code

Each of these converts into an engineering quarter a buyer must fund before they can grow the asset. Sellers who name and scope them first keep control of that estimate.