TL;DR (May 2026) — My indie SaaS on Apify Store dropped from 51 lifetime users to 12 monthly active in 3 months. Diagnostic: a misleading "Succeeded" status was hiding zero-item runs from users. Fix: detect anti-bot challenges explicitly + fail loud + bind residential proxies to the URL country. Then I rebalanced pricing — small batches dropped 50%, large batches doubled. Same revenue projection, far less churn. Three engineering decisions, one product turnaround. I shipped my first paid Apify actor in early 2026. By month three, the dashboard was telling two different stories. The success-rate graph said 91%. The MAU graph said I had lost 76% of my users — from 51 lifetime to 12 monthly active. Both were technically true. The gap between them is what this article is about. If you ship indie SaaS, sell scrapers, or run any product where customers can churn silently, the patterns here apply.…