App crashed 4 hours, nobody fixed it — this actually happened recently
Recently saw the news — Firebase was down for 4 hours, nobody on it. I exhaled and thought "good thing I don't use it," then immediately pivoted — are my paid SaaS tools really any different?
This made me realize: solo operators fear "single points of failure" most
Firebase is a backend service for mobile apps. Think of it as "user data, login, push notifications — all sitting on Google's servers." That day they changed some internal config and tens of thousands of apps globally crashed for 2-6 hours.
Even worse: Google's own status page wasn't updated, no apology came out. Pragmatic Engineer's author Gergely wrote a line that really hit — "This is an unbelievable incident from a company famous for incident management."
My friend Xiaolin runs a paid community in Beijing. His stack: mini-program backend on a cloud provider, payments through a third-party processor, email via an overseas service. I asked him "if one of these goes down for 4 hours, what do you do?" He paused for half a beat before saying "I probably wouldn't even know."
This lines up with another observation from Pragmatic Engineer: lots of big-tech senior managers are quitting because "with AI, one person can do it all." But after going solo, your entire lifeline sits on a few tools — if the tool breaks, you break.
What you can do today: 30 minutes to build your "vendor inventory"
No money needed, no code needed. Open an Excel or Notion sheet and list every paid tool you use daily. Next to each, write two things:
- If it goes down, does it directly block you from getting paid?
- What's its official status page URL?
- Cost: $0
- Time: 30 minutes
- Tech barrier: just Excel or Notion
- First step: pull up your last credit card statement and count how many SaaS tools you actually paid for
Once you finish, you'll find a brutal fact: for many tools you don't even know their status page URL. That's already the starting point for improvement — at least bookmark its status page in your browser.
Three different playbooks depending on where you are
If you're just starting out (side project kicked off, still validating the direction): no formal plan needed yet. What you can do — don't store all your user data in just one place. For example, keep customer tables in both Notion and Google Sheet, export your email list periodically as backup.
If you have 1-2 paying customers: every critical tool needs a "Plan B." For example, if your main email tool is Mailchimp, know how to switch to Mailerlite; main payment is Alipay, but WeChat Pay should be openable too. The Firebase incident shows even the most reliable vendors go down.
If you're scaling (team of 5+, stable monthly revenue of 50k+): you genuinely need a formal vendor list and incident playbook. But if you feel it's too early, you can put it off — I personally didn't realize I needed a vendor list until I was already using three SaaS tools. None of us need to lose sleep over it. Spend 30 minutes tomorrow listing them, and you'll already be ahead of 90% of your peers.