SaaS Technical Debt Recovery: A Case Study

The Challenge

Jen launched TaskFlow, a project management tool, 8 months ago using Bolt.new. The AI generated a working MVP in days. She quickly got her first 50 paying customers at $29/month.

But as customers requested features, Jen hit a painful reality. Every new feature took forever to build. A 2-day update turned into 2-3 months of struggle. Simple changes broke unrelated features. The codebase was a tangled mess of AI-generated code that she was afraid to touch.

Her customers were getting frustrated. Competitors were moving faster. And Jen was stuck. She could not keep up with feature requests or fix bugs quickly. The poor AI system design meant she could not hire a developer to help because the code was too messy.

She was spending 60 hours a week just debugging the AI app, with no time to grow the business. Churn was creeping up.

The Partnership

When Jen contacted us, she was contemplating starting over. She had invested $8,000 and 8 months but felt completely stuck. Could the app be saved?

We started with a deep codebase audit. What we found:

• 12,000 lines of AI-generated code with minimal structure.
• The same logic duplicated in 15+ different places.
• No automated tests, making AI reliability impossible to verify.
• Security vulnerabilities in authentication.

But the foundation was solid. The core features customers loved were there. They just needed to be organized and made maintainable. We laid out two options for Jen: rebuild from scratch or a systematic refactoring. Jen chose to refactor. She needed to keep serving her current customers while we made the app maintainable. This is a common challenge we help founders with at AppUnstuck.

The Solution

Weeks 1-2: Critical Fixes and Foundation

We started with the scariest parts: security and performance. We fixed authentication holes and optimized the slowest queries. We also set up automated tests for core features. This would let us make changes confidently.

Weeks 3-4: Code Organization

This was where the magic happened. We took all that duplicated logic and organized it into reusable components. This concept is central to addressing what experts like Martin Fowler call technical debt. We added proper error handling so Jen would know immediately if something went wrong.

Weeks 5-6: Developer Experience

We set up a safe development environment for Jen to test changes. We created deployment scripts so pushing updates took one click. We added monitoring and alerts. By week 6, Jen could add new features herself again.

The Results

The transformation was dramatic. Two weeks after we finished, Jen shipped a feature customers had been requesting for 4 months. It took her 3 days instead of 3 months.

Development Speed:

• ✅ Feature development: 3 months → 3 days (10x faster)
• ✅ Bug fixes: Days → Hours
• ✅ Deployment: 45 minutes → 2 minutes

Business Impact:

• ✅ Shipped 5 major features in 2 months
• ✅ Revenue grew from $1,450/month to $3,800/month
• ✅ Churn dropped from 8% to 2%
• ✅ Hired a part-time developer

Peace of Mind:

• ✅ Works 35 hours/week instead of 60
• ✅ Not afraid to add features anymore
• ✅ Knows when things break

"I was ready to give up. AppUnstuck showed me that my app was not beyond saving—it just needed structure. Now I can build features in days instead of months. My revenue has more than doubled since we finished."

— Jen Martinez, TaskFlow Founder

Six months later, Jen has 180 paying customers and just raised a small seed round. She has hired two developers who were able to get productive quickly.

Key Takeaways

Warning signs you might have technical debt:

• New features take exponentially longer than they should.
• You are afraid to change anything because it might break something else.
• You cannot hire developers because the code is too messy.
• Simple bugs take days or weeks to fix.

When refactoring makes sense:

If you have paying customers and core features that work, refactoring is almost always better than rebuilding. You can keep serving customers, improve the code incrementally, and spend less time and money.

Get Unstuck

Stuck with a messy codebase that is slowing you down? We can help you get back to shipping fast without starting over.

Get Your Free Codebase Audit →

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This case study represents a common scenario we see with AI-generated SaaS products. Client details have been modified to protect privacy.