The final weeks before launching a SaaS are busy, and it's easy to miss something that causes a rocky start. This checklist breaks the work into four phases so you can check that your product, marketing and administrative foundations are in place before you go live.

Phase 1: Product & Technical Readiness

This is about making sure the product itself is stable.

  • 1. Finalize Core Features: Lock down the feature set for your v1. Stop adding new things and focus on stability. Why? Feature creep is a common reason launches slip.
  • 2. Conduct Thorough QA & Bug Squashing: Test every user flow, button, and form. Fix every critical and major bug. Use tools like Jira, Linear, or even a simple spreadsheet.
  • 3. Set Up Transactional Emails: Ensure your welcome emails, password resets, and payment receipts are styled, written, and sending correctly. Set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC for your sending domain to help keep these out of the spam folder.
  • 4. Install and Test Analytics: Integrate your analytics suite (like Google Analytics, Plausible, or Fathom) and confirm it's tracking pageviews, events, and conversions accurately.
  • 5. Implement Error Monitoring: Set up a service like Sentry or Flare to get alerts for any backend or frontend errors your first users encounter.
  • 6. Do a Final Security Review: Check for common vulnerabilities (like XSS, SQL injection and broken access control between accounts). Ensure HTTPS is active and correctly configured.

Phase 2: Marketing & Website Readiness

Your marketing site is your storefront. It doesn't need to be perfect, but it needs to be clear.

  • 7. Finalize Website Copy & Design: Your value proposition should be clear on the homepage. Ensure your pricing page is easy to understand and your FAQ section answers key questions.
  • 8. Optimize On-Page SEO: Every page should have a unique, descriptive <title> and <meta name="description">. Use our Meta Tag & Open Graph Generator to write and preview them. The SaaS SEO Checklist covers the rest.
  • 9. Set Up Social Sharing Tags: When your site is shared, does it look good? Configure Open Graph and Twitter Card tags to control the preview image, title, and description, then check them with the social preview tester.
  • 10. Create a "Coming Soon" Landing Page: Before the full launch, use a simple landing page to collect emails from interested users. This builds your initial audience.
  • 11. Prepare Your Launch Day Content: Write your blog post, social media announcements, and emails in advance so you can focus on engagement on launch day.

Phase 3: Legal & Administrative

Don't let the "boring" stuff trip you up.

  • 12. Create Your Privacy Policy & ToS: Have clear Terms of Service and a Privacy Policy. A privacy policy is legally required in many jurisdictions if you collect personal data, and both help build trust. If you're unsure what applies to you, get advice from a lawyer.
  • 13. Set Up Your Payment Gateway: Connect and test your Stripe or Paddle account. Run test-mode transactions through the whole flow, then one real transaction in live mode (you can refund it). Stripe + Laravel Subscriptions: 12 Common Gotchas and Fixes lists what to check.
  • 14. Establish Customer Support Channels: Decide how users will get help. Will it be a chat widget, a dedicated email address, or a simple contact form? Make sure it's visible.

Phase 4: The Final Countdown

The last few days before you go live.

  • 15. Back Up Everything: Create a full backup of your database, code, and server configuration, and test that you can restore it.
  • 16. Prepare Your Launch Channels: Draft your posts for Product Hunt, Hacker News, Reddit, directories like BuildVoyage, and other communities. Read the rules of each community before posting.
  • 17. Inform Your Email List: Send a "heads up" email to your waitlist a day or two before you launch.
  • 18. Get a Good Night's Sleep: You've done the work. Launch day will be busy, so face it well-rested and ready.

Launch day is the start, not the finish. Once you're live, the B2B SaaS Go-to-Market Checklist and the Customer Onboarding Checklist cover what comes next.