What to check before your first SaaS launch
A short launch-readiness guide for payments, auth, email, SMS, webhooks, and production health.
The first launch check should be boring and concrete. Confirm the systems that block signups, payments, onboarding, and alerts before real users arrive.
Start with the critical path
Test Stripe checkout, auth callbacks, password reset, transactional email, SMS if your product uses it, and the public health endpoint. These are the systems that turn small configuration mistakes into visible launch failures.
Keep watching after deploy
A green pre-launch check is not the finish line. Keep monitoring the first 24 hours after deploy, when delayed webhooks, retry queues, DNS changes, and provider limits usually show up.
Monitoring should not page you for every isolated network wobble. Good launch monitoring retries transient failures, requires repeated health failures before downtime alerts, and sends recovery messages when the service comes back. The goal is to reduce alert fatigue without hiding real customer-impacting failures.
Make every fix specific
A useful check should name the provider, the failed behavior, the safe error detail, and the next action. If it cannot tell you where to look, it is just another vague dashboard.
A beginner-friendly launch flow
If this is your first SaaS launch, do not try to configure everything at once. Create the project, add one public URL, connect Stripe and your email provider, run a check, and fix the first failed row. Then add Supabase, auth, alert channels, and monitoring. Momentum matters more than a perfect dashboard on the first day.
Save screenshots or exports of the final green run. They become useful when you need to prove what changed between "it worked before launch" and "customers are reporting a failure."