The Soft Delete Trap In Laravel, enabling SoftDeletes is as easy as adding a trait to your Eloquent model and a deleted_at timestamp to your migration. It feels like a massive win for data safetyβif a user accidentally deletes a critical project, you can easily restore it. However, as your B2B SaaS scales, this convenience quickly transforms into an architectural nightmare. The primary issue lies with Unique Constraints . Imagine a user deletes their account, effectively setting deleted_at to today's date. A month later, they try to sign up again with the exact same email address. Your database will throw a fatal error because the email is still physically in the table, violating the unique index. You now have to write complex, messy logic to check for soft-deleted emails, restore them, or uniquely scope your database indexes across the entire platform.β¦