Custom software products have been facing a massive disruption for years. It’s their failure rate: 31.1% of them are documented to be cancelled (or “put on hold”) before completion, with 52.7% of them surpassing their initial costs by up to 89%.
As a custom enterprise software development company, we are going to address 5 features that can help you avoid costly mistakes and launch your project successfully.
API-First Architecture with Failure Handling
APIs make it possible to connect your app to dozens of tools at a time. Yet, they can also get in the way of seamless development. The more APIs you use, the higher the chance of an unexpected breakdown.
Here’s what can undermine your progress:
- Authentication failures – often cause system breaks without warning;
- Rate limiting – provoked by traffic spikes;
- Versioning conflicts – third-party updates might lead to an integration failure;
- Security vulnerabilities – attackers choose APIs as their primary targets.
Even industry leaders aren’t immune to API-related disruptions. In 2025, Starlink faced an outage, which was reported to be “failure of key internal software services.” As for average B2B SaaS software, at least 12 tools are required to cover essential use-cases. APIs are constantly getting updated, so if you prioritize fixing integrations over building API-first architecture, you’re already at a loss.
What to put first:
- Thorough retry flow with exponential backoff;
- Automated testing that catches integration breaks in your CI/CD pipeline;
- Circuit breakers, halting disrupted API calls without accumulating them;
- Live monitoring features to address time spikes before users notice;
- Fallback procedures for external API failures.
If you put these features on the back burner, you risk losing customers and revenue while developing them post-release. This is especially crucial for tools employing payment processors (customers would rather abandon a checkout page than sit there for minutes).
Built-In Scalability Patterns
“We’ll scale later” is the most expensive lie in software development. Later means rewriting everything at three times the cost.
Let’s look into a popular scenario: your app launches, users love it, traffic soars, and the system comes to a standstill. That is what happened to Airbnb. Their Rails monolith stalled. They migrated to microservices, implemented Kubernetes for dynamic scaling, adopted database sharding, and employed caching features. All of these helped them handle peak traffic and avoid significant downtime.
Build these from the start:
- Database sharding and replication (indexing alone is not enough).
- Load balancing with auto-scaling that adjusts resources based on traffic.
- Multi-level caching (in-memory and distributed cache systems).
- Asynchronous processing for background tasks.
- CDNs to reduce latency for global users.
When you use SELECT * in database queries, you pull unnecessary data that increases I/O. When you pass indexing on frequently queried columns, it results in full table scans. These small decisions compound. To show you the difference, apps using edge computing report 50-80% improvements in Time to First Byte.
Don’t wait to waste more money. Build for scalability from the start.
Security-by-Design
Microsoft admitted that 70% of their vulnerabilities come from memory safety issues in their C and C++ codebase. Therefore, security should shape every architectural decision. That is confirmed by the market statistics: 78% of companies increased cybersecurity investments in 2024-2025.
What companies faced in 2025:
- The Bybit theft: $1.5 billion stolen through a supply chain attack in wallet software.
- Shai-Hulud worm: First self-propagating npm worm that reached 500+ package versions through harvesting tokens and pushing malicious versions.
- API vulnerabilities: Poor authentication, missing encryption, insecure endpoints.
Security-by-design implies:
- OAuth for authentication;
- SSL/TLS encryption for all data transmission;
- Input validation and parameterized queries to stop SQL injection.
- Regular vulnerability scanning against OWASP Top 10.
- Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) tracking for every dependency.
- Automated security testing in your CI/CD pipeline.
Compliance requirements vary by industry:
- Healthcare software: HIPAA compliance adds $75,000-$250,000+ to project costs.
- FinTech platforms: Payment processing and fraud detection with regulatory compliance costs $90,000-$300,000+.
- Financial data: PCI-DSS and Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act requirements for encryption and access control.
The costs are high, but the final price you’re paying might be higher than this. A data breach will inevitably lead to your customers’ trust evaporating, along with your revenue.
Real-Time Performance Monitoring
Performance issues undermine your processes silently. You might not notice this, but your users sure do. Most teams wait until staging or production to diagnose performance problems. Do not wait until that.
Real-time monitoring requires:
- APM tools like New Relic, Datadog, or Dynatrace that track metrics continuously;
- Automated alerts for error rate spikes and response time degradation;
- Profiling tools that pinpoint slow code segments;
- Load testing with tools like JMeter or Gatling before deployment;
- Database query performance monitoring.
AI-powered performance software now predicts mishaps before they happen through analyzing patterns in CPU, memory, and latency to auto-scale resources and optimize queries. If you opt out of monitoring, issues will pile up. Southwest Airlines lost customer loyalty. The FAA lost public confidence. The New York Stock Exchange had a hiccup that involved people’s financial well-being. I bet you don’t want to be one of them.
Living Documentation
Teams often choose shipping code over writing documentation. Then six months later, nobody remembers why critical architectural decisions were made. New developers take weeks to onboard, so bug fixing looks like archaeology.
Undocumented software becomes unmaintainable pretty fast.
Documentation is a must for:
- API docs that update automatically (use Swagger or Postman).
- Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) explaining why you chose a specific tech stack.
- Database schema documentation with relationship diagrams.
- Deployment procedures and rollback plans.
- Integration testing documentation.
When business and technical teams fall out of alignment, which happens constantly when documentation lags, you get mismatched expectations, scope creep, and expensive rework.
The cost of ignoring documentation:
- Increased annual maintenance costs by 15-25%.
- Onboarding new developers takes 3-4x longer.
- Bug fixes take reverse-engineering decisions.
Documentation must be a top-of-the-mind deliverable. Integrate documentation into your CI/CD pipeline. Utilize tools that produce your API docs automatically from your code. Store ADRs in version control with your codebase.
To Sum Up
These five conditions make a difference between software that scales and one that collapses under its own weight. The API resilience, scalability patterns, and security-by-design investment upfront is cheaper than rewrites.
