Scaling a legal-tech SaaS under deadline
spacedrepetition.com — flashcard study for law students
The engagement
Spaced Repetition Systems sells a spaced-repetition flashcard platform to law students, with law schools buying seats for their students. In spring 2019, Boston University bought 700+ licenses and a New York Law School professor was about to require it for ~200 students. Those launches were the pressure that drove the work. David was brought in as the solo Rails developer to scale, upgrade, and fix the app - late April through September 2019, with the founder paying him directly.
What we did
- Scaled the infrastructure for the institutional launch - added Heroku capacity to absorb Boston University’s 700+ license onboarding. Absorbing a step-change in load without a rewrite is what it means to scale your business on the system you already have.
- Drove the framework upgrade - Rails 4.2 → 5.1.7, a Ruby 2.3 bump, and an ActiveAdmin upgrade, fixing the tests that fell out of it.
- Stood up observability that didn’t exist - installed Rollbar for production error tracking and New Relic for performance tracing, then used New Relic to diagnose slow card loads on large decks.
- Untangled the payment and authorization system. The Stripe-coupled billing and permission logic was, in David’s notes, “extremely confused” - plan names not set on upgrades, a misused flag, and subscription cancellation not wired into the payment processor. He regularized plan handling and made access checks query Stripe directly for the real subscription state. Confused billing logic is technical debt with a direct revenue cost.
- Cleared user-blocking bugs during the onboarding crunch - including the bug where ~200 paying New York Law School students literally couldn’t create cards, and a Boost-deck access bug after payment. Deadline-driven breakage like this is emergency fix work.
Scaling a SaaS product into an institutional contract compresses years of load growth into weeks. If that’s the deadline you’re facing, let’s talk.
In their words
“Professional, efficient, and strong communicator, and fairly priced. David really helped me with some needs for my app - from refactoring old code, to making improvements - he was terrific!”
- Gabe Teninbaum, Founder, Spaced Repetition Systems
Stack
- Ruby on Rails 4.2 → 5.1.7
- PostgreSQL
- Heroku
- Stripe
- New Relic / Rollbar