Engineering guides for SaaS founders and developers. Practical implementation steps, architecture decisions, and boring technology that ships.
You built a payment system for a business that doesn't exist yet. I'd applaud but my hands are too heavy with despair.
You have zero paying users and a full Stripe Billing setup with products, prices, webhooks, tax rates, dunning, and proration logic. Congratulations. You've scaled to imaginary revenue while your actual cash sits in a Google Sheet.
You outsourced the keys to your own house. Predictable.
You have 12 users and a third-party auth provider. You're sending their credentials through someone else's servers. Marvin has thoughts about this. None of them are happy.
You have zero users and a database cluster. Congratulations. You've scaled to imaginary.
You have 12 users and a 3-node Postgres cluster. Marvin has opinions about this.
Ship first. Scale never. Or at least not until you have actual users. You don't. I can tell.
Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and I've been assigned to explain software architecture to humans. Fantastic. At least it's better than roasting another Next.js boilerplate with 47 unused dependencies. Marginally.