Business Plan
RouteSafe — The pre-deploy route gate
A developer-tools SaaS that turns post-deploy 404 audits into a pre-merge PR check. Built for the staff engineer at a 30–300-person product company who owns the deploy pipeline. PE Score: 8.0/10 (FUND) · Director confidence: 0.45 (smoke-test fixture — all figures are modeled/assumption).
Capital ask
$195K
ModeledTarget MRR (18mo)
$30K
ModeledGross margin (scale)
~82%
ModeledLTV:CAC (blended)
4.2:1
ModeledThe Problem
Route renames break things quietly. A pricing page restructure, a docs migration, a CMS slug update — none of them fire a failing test. They ship, and 48 hours later someone forwards a support ticket or flags an SEO regression. 73% of teams discover post-deploy route breaks via support or SEO, not CI. Assumption
The post-deploy crawl tools that exist (Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, Search Console) are too slow — they fire hours to days after the break. OSS link-checkers (lychee, broken-link-checker) don't model slug renames. The gap is at PR time, before merge, when the fix is still cheap.
Target Customer
Primary user
Deploy-Owner Engineer
Staff engineer at a 30–300-person product company who owns the deploy pipeline. Has been paged for last week's broken slug. Wants to trust deploys, not crawl the site after every release.
- ✓ Every PR that renames a route shows a RouteSafe annotation before merge
- ✓ One-click redirect stub commits into the PR
- ✓ No SEO regression in 30 days post-rollout
Buyer
Engineering Manager / VP Eng
Reduce post-deploy SEO and support-ticket downside without a vendor review. The $199/mo Team line is below the $250/mo procurement threshold. Staff engineer can onboard without security review (SOC 2 Type I evidence available).
WTP: $49–$199/mo per repo
Launch wedge: headless-CMS-driven marketing sites (Sanity / Contentful / Webflow + Next.js/Astro) at 30–150-person SaaS shops with ≥50-path public route trees and GitHub Actions CI.
Solution
Flow 1: Snapshot production manifest
On every production deploy, RouteSafe records the full public route manifest as a content-addressed SHA256 snapshot. This becomes the authoritative baseline.
Flow 2: Diff PR build against baseline
The GitHub Action walks build output, generates route manifest JSON, and diffs against production snapshot. Every path that will 404 is flagged. Payload: path strings + hashes only — no source code.
Flow 3: Annotate PR, block merge, generate stubs
PR check posts the broken slug list. Merge button blocked until every slug has a stub or explicit override. One-click stub generation commits the redirect config back to the branch.
$49/mo
Starter (1 repo)
$199/mo
Team (up to 10 repos)
Most popularCustom
Enterprise (unlimited)
Why we win
Moat 1
Data flywheel
Slug-similarity model for stub destination suggestions improves with every manifested repo. Competitors can copy the feature; they can't copy the accumulated training signal.
Moat 2
Workflow lock-in
Once in the merge-blocked check list, removing RouteSafe requires a deliberate engineering decision. The gate becomes infrastructure.
Moat 3
GitHub Marketplace distribution
Zero-CAC organic distribution via fork-and-PR. Engineers install the Action before ever visiting the website.
Moat 4
Network stub library
Shared redirect stub library grows with each Team/Enterprise customer. Common CMS slug rename patterns get auto-suggested.
Moat confidence: all four are directionally sound but unvalidated — treat as hypothesis pending design-partner validation. Assumption
Honest risks
Risk register
| Risk | Severity | Likelihood | Mitigation | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Headless-CMS slug renames bypass the CI gate entirely (content edits never trigger a PR) | high | medium | Phase-4 webhook integration with Sanity / Contentful; document the gap in marketing copy until shipped. | Assumption |
| GitHub Checks API rate limits throttle annotations during deploy-heavy windows | medium | medium | Per-installation queue with backoff; pre-negotiated higher tier before 1K repos. | Modeled |
| Customer security team blocks manifest egress, demanding self-hosted runner earlier than planned | medium | medium | Ship a self-hosted runner option in phase 4; document manifest-only egress in security one-pager. | Modeled |
| SOC 2 Type II audit slips past phase 3, blocking enterprise deals | medium | low | Engage audit firm in phase 2; automate quarterly evidence collection. | Assumption |
Financials at a glance
All figures are modeled — smoke-test fixture. Central-case unit economics: $800 CAC, $199 ARPU (Team tier), 86% gross margin, 5% monthly churn → 20 months to payback. Modeled
Unit economics
| ARPU (blended) | ~$199/mo Modeled |
| Gross margin (Team) | ~85% Modeled |
| CAC (central) | $800 Modeled |
| LTV:CAC (blended) | 4.2:1 Modeled |
| Break-even (MRR) | $30K MRR Modeled |
Market sizing
| TAM | $2.1B Assumption |
| SAM | $420M Modeled |
| SOM (Y3) | $18M Modeled |
CAC × Churn — months to payback
| 3% churn | 4% churn | 5% churn | 6% churn | 7% churn | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $400 CAC | 6.0 | 8.0 | 10.0 | 12.0 | 14.0 |
| $600 CAC | 9.0 | 12.0 | 15.0 | 18.0 | 21.0 |
| $800 CAC (central) | 12.0 | 16.0 | 20.0 | 24.0 | 28.0 |
| $1,000 CAC | 15.0 | 20.0 | 25.0 | 30.0 | 35.0 |
| $1,200 CAC | 18.0 | 24.0 | 30.0 | 36.0 | 42.0 |
Full financial model and cashflow schedule: investor brief → Financial Model tab.
Looking for
An operator who has scaled developer-tools SaaS from $0 to $2M ARR via bottoms-up CI/CD adoption. Former staff engineer turned founder, ex-Vercel / Linear / Sentry / PlanetScale GTM, or a DevOps-focused angel with deep CI/CD-buyer relationships. Comfortable closing $199/mo per-repo deals without procurement-heavy enterprise motion in the first 12 months.
Get in touch →