Built my first SaaS at 17. Got to $200 MRR. And then I hit a wall.

Not because of bad code. Because of 5 technical decisions that compounded:

1. Priced at $10/mo

Attracted wrong customers → they requested niche features → I built them (dark mode: 2 days, 3 users) → codebase bloat (2k→8k lines) → my velocity died.

When I added $25/mo tier, 40% upgraded immediately (pretty high actually).

2. Built without validation

I spent 2 weeks building a dashboard. Only 3 people used it. Everyone else used the API.

Should've asked first. Wasted 40% of total dev time on features <5 people used.

3. Over-engineered for 120 users

Built 3 microservices, Redis caching, rate limiting. All for 120 users.

Result: 3x slower to ship, 5x harder to debug.

4. Ignored dependencies

Randomly at night, my production auth broke. 6 hours debugging. The cause: Next.js breaking change I missed.

Cost: 3 incidents, 40 wasted hours, 2 lost weekends.

Dependabot spam is real. 50+ alerts/week, with zero context. Everyone ignores it.

(Building repo20 to fix this - AI that tells you what breaks YOUR code specifically. Launches next week.)

5. No email infrastructure

Launched to 0 subscribers. Couldn't announce features. Couldn't iterate. Users churned silently.

The cascade:

Low price → wrong features → over-engineering → technical debt → dependency hell → slow iteration → dead

Full breakdown: https://dontkillsaas.framer.website/

What technical decisions killed your velocity?