How to Do Technical Due Diligence on a SaaS

For a software business, the financials tell you what happened; the technical due diligence tells you whether it can keep happening. A SaaS can look healthy on a P&L and still be carrying risk that a careful buyer will find — brittle code, a single engineer who understands the whole system, security gaps, metrics that don't reconcile. Technical diligence is where buyers protect their downside, and where unprepared sellers watch their valuation get chipped away.

What buyers actually inspect

• Code quality and technical debt. Is the codebase maintainable, or a pile of shortcuts that will cost the buyer to untangle? Heavy debt is a price-reduction argument.
• Architecture and scalability. Will the system handle growth, or does scaling require a rebuild? Buyers pay for headroom.
• Security and data practices. How is customer data stored and protected? Known vulnerabilities, weak access controls, or compliance gaps are serious red flags.
• Infrastructure and dependencies. Hosting, third-party services, and single points of failure — including reliance on one provider or one library that could break.
• Key-person risk. If one developer holds the whole system in their head, the business is fragile. Buyers discount that heavily.
• Metrics integrity. Do the product analytics — users, churn, usage — reconcile with the financials? Numbers that don't tie out destroy trust fast.

For sellers: prepare before they look

Everything above is also a preparation checklist. Before you go to market: document the architecture, reduce key-person risk by spreading knowledge and writing things down, close obvious security gaps, and make sure your product metrics match your financials. The goal is to give a buyer nothing to discount.

Where EBB fits

We came up in digital businesses, and we know what a sharp buyer looks for under the hood. We help sellers get buyer-ready before diligence starts — so the inspection confirms your value instead of eroding it.