A freelance developer recently posted on r/SaaS something that made me laugh because of how real it is. When a non-technical founder asks for a simple MVP, the build takes two weeks and the quote is reasonable. But when a founder asks for microservices and Kubernetes “so we can scale to millions,” the quote doubles.
Instead of a simple session handler, now there’s a separate Auth Service. That’s 10 billable hours. Instead of one SQL database, now there are three syncing via events. That’s a week of work. Instead of a $5 VPS, there’s a complex AWS cluster to configure. The app does the exact same thing. It just costs $5.000 a month to maintain instead of $50.
I’ve seen this play out too many times. So here’s my take on why microservices are almost always the wrong choice at the early stage, and what to do instead.
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