I Ran a 13-Point Security Audit on My AI-Built SaaS Before My First Customer — Here's What It Found

I have a Stripe integration, a JWT auth system, magic link recovery, Redis-backed rate limiting, and a free tier that lets strangers use my AI generation feature without logging in. Last Friday I ran a full security audit on the codebase — before opening it up to real users at scale. The audit found 13 issues. One was a Critical business-logic bug I would have missed forever. Three were High severity. The rest were Medium and Low hardening gaps. Here's what happened. Why I Audited Before Revenue