Shipping in stealth? Your invited users are your only chance to make a first impression.
Public launches are forgiving. Someone hits a 500, they post about it, you patch and move on. Stealth launches are not. Your design partners have veto power. Your enterprise pilots have exit clauses. Your invite list is small, engaged, and unforgiving of the boring stuff. Cafiyn Pulse is the pre-launch kit for teams who do not have the luxury of a public soft launch to catch what breaks: free production audit, free AI cost model, free launch checklist, all without leaking anything about what you are building.
You give up feedback loops. You keep the standards.
Public launches get thousands of small QA testers for free. You do not. Every user you have is a stakeholder in the outcome, and the ones who leave rarely come back. Being production-ready is not a nice-to-have. It is the price of admission.
Cafiyn Pulse gives you a private way to grade the same categories a fractional CTO would grade if you could afford one, and a private way to model your AI bill without letting a provider account manager see your usage pattern. Neither tool requires exposing your product URL, your feature list, or your customer identities.
Stealth-specific pains.
Your three free tools.
All three save to your account and pick up from any device.
Other builders in adjacent seats.
Built for exactly your situation.
Common questions.
What is "building in stealth"?
Shipping to a small, private audience (design partners, an invite list, a small paying beta) before the public launch. Common for enterprise SaaS pre-lighthouse-logos, for AI startups negotiating pricing with early customers, and for anyone who does not want competitors to see the wedge until it is defensible.
Why do stealth teams still need a launch checklist?
Because your invited users are usually your most important users. Design partners have veto power. Enterprise pilots have exit clauses. If they hit a bug on their first login, you have already used your one chance. The Launch Checklist is even more useful in stealth than in public launches, because you cannot patch reputation after the fact.
Do stealth teams need the same 10 categories in the Stack Grader?
Yes, and often with tighter thresholds. Enterprise design partners will ask about authentication, backups, and access control before they sign a pilot. Being able to say "we grade A on these 10 categories" is faster than filling out their vendor security questionnaire from scratch.
How does an NDA affect my AI provider choice?
It affects whether you can send data to third-party APIs at all, and whether you need zero-retention terms. The Cost Comparator does not know about your NDA, but it does list the providers that offer no-retention modes (Anthropic ZDR, OpenAI zero-data-retention on Enterprise, self-hosted Llama, DeepSeek self-hosted). Pick from those if your NDA forbids third-party training.
Can I share my grade card without revealing the product?
Yes. The grade card shows your letter grade, score, and a link to the tool. It does not show your app URL, feature list, or customer list. Safe to share in a fundraise deck or with a design partner.
How do stealth teams avoid a "leaked launch"?
Two things. First, no public press or Product Hunt post until you are ready. Second, control the shape of your invite links so a screenshot cannot bring the whole thing down. Signed magic-link auth with one-time codes is standard; Cafiyn Pulse ships with that pattern out of the box and the Stack Grader has the exact tier definitions if you want to match it.
What is the smallest possible launch surface I can grade?
A single hosted URL plus your provider dashboards (Vercel / Render / Supabase / Neon / Stripe / Sentry / Resend). The Stack Grader is designed for exactly this shape. You do not need to expose your product to grade it.
Open the tool.
Nothing about your product needs to be public. The grade lives in your account, the fix plan is yours to work, and the letter grade is share-safe.
Grade your stealth stack privately