The scariest line item on a balance sheet isn't always the debt. Sometimes it's what's you can’t learn from the financials. I was looking at a 20+ year old vertical SaaS business. I liked the owners. They had great retention, customers loved the company, but revenue had been flat for two decades. On paper it looked like a steady cash cow, ripe for a growth-minded buyer. As a GTM operator, it seemed perfect for me. Then I got the actual tech stack. It was an 80’s legacy platform with a non-relational database, a thick desktop client, and single-tenant deployments. Support costs were running 3x engineering spend, which I initially read as "great customer service culture." It was partly that. It was also the product requiring constant human hand-holding to function, and owning this business would require a serious capital infusion to retire the tech debt. I’ve lived through this once before, and it wasn’t fun. The tell I'd flag for other searchers: if a company's support-to-engineering cost ratio is wildly inverted from what you'd expect for its category, ask *why* before you assume it's a service-quality story. Sometimes it is. And sometimes the support team is quietly doing the job the product should be doing. I walked from this one. Not because the business was bad, but because the capital and time required to fix the tech stack honestly doesn’t fit my buy box. Good business, wrong moment for me. Sharing in case the pattern helps someone else's diligence. What other non-financial tells are y’all seeing that make you walk away?