The gap between a working prototype and a real SaaS product is mostly unglamorous: billing, auth, reliability, and support. Knowing the order to tackle them keeps you from rebuilding everything later.
Get the foundations right
- Authentication and accounts you will not have to rip out.
- Billing through a provider rather than rolling your own.
- Basic observability so you learn about outages before customers do.
Resist premature scale
Your first hundred customers do not need a microservices architecture. Ship a solid monolith, charge money, and let real demand tell you what to scale.