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          Engineering
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        <span class="idet-header-date">February 12, 2026</span>
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        <span class="idet-header-read"><i class="far fa-clock"></i> 11 min read</span>
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        Why Most SaaS Architectures Fail at Scale — and What to Do About It
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        After rebuilding three production SaaS platforms in the last two years, we've identified the same five architectural decisions that seem reasonable at launch and catastrophic at 10× scale. Here's what we learned and how to avoid it.
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            <div class="idet-author-name">Marcus Thorne</div>
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          A production codebase six months after launch. The architecture decisions made in the first sprint are still visible — for better or worse.
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        <p class="idet-lead-para">There is a moment in every successful SaaS product's life when the architecture that got it to market becomes the architecture that threatens to kill it. It usually arrives somewhere between the first enterprise customer and the second. The symptoms are always the same: deployments slow to a crawl, on-call rotations become relentless, and the team spends more time working around the system than building on top of it.</p>

        <p>We've seen this arc play out three times in the last two years across three very different products — a logistics intelligence platform, a B2B analytics SaaS, and a document automation tool. In each case, the same five categories of architectural decisions created the crisis. In each case, they had seemed entirely reasonable at the time they were made.</p>



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