Print this. Tick it. Anything still open on launch day is either a decision or a bug a customer will find for you. This is the same list we run on client products and on our own.
Billing (the ones that lose money silently)
Plans live in Stripe, not in code. Trial end, upgrade, downgrade, and cancel are tested with test cards. Webhooks are verified and idempotent. payment_failed downgrades access after a grace period. Entitlements are checked on the server. Usage limits exist for any metered feature. Tax is collected. A real card has been charged and refunded. The customer portal is linked from settings.
Legal minimums
Terms and privacy are live and linked on signup. A DPA exists if you sell to EU/UK businesses. Cookie consent exists if you use non-essential cookies in the EU. Account deletion and data export exist, even if they are manual. Support is a monitored inbox. Your legal entity is on the invoices.
Onboarding
Signup to first value takes under three minutes. Empty states tell people what to do. A welcome email sends in 60 seconds with one action. Trial-ending emails go out at 3 days and 1 day. Failed-payment email has a one-click fix. Transactional mail is on your domain with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.
Reliability
Errors go to Sentry, not the console. Something pings the app every minute. Backups are automatic and one has been restored. Auth, signup, and any AI endpoint are rate-limited. Staging matches production. Rollback takes under five minutes.
Analytics
The marketing site has privacy-friendly analytics. Product events fire for signup, activated, upgraded, churned. One dashboard shows those four plus MRR. UTM parameters survive signup. Search Console has the sitemap.
Launch day
Freeze deploys 24 hours out. Test the full path on a phone. At T-0, one link and one CTA. Reply to every comment in the first hour. Ship one visible fix in the first six hours. Email anyone who signed up and did not activate after 24 hours.
The annotated version, with the first-week dashboard, is the SaaS Launch Checklist playbook. If you are two weeks from launch and more than ten boxes are open, you have a scoping problem, not a speed problem.