Microservices are a tax your startup probably can’t afford
Microservices promise scalability and team independence, but for most startups, they deliver complexity without benefits. You’re paying the price of distributed systems before you have the problems they solve.
The hidden costs add up fast
Microservices force you to solve distributed systems problems from day one. Your small team now manages service discovery, network failures, data consistency, and deployment orchestration. Each service needs its own monitoring, logging, and testing infrastructure.
Local development becomes a nightmare. Engineers spend hours setting up environments that used to work with a single npm start. Simple features now require coordinating changes across multiple services, turning two-day tasks into two-week projects.
When complexity doesn’t match scale
A startup with hundreds of users doesn’t need the architecture that supports millions. One developer described a company with 50 engineers, dozens of services, and only a few hundred monthly active users. They burned through $50M in VC funding before shutting down—not because their product was bad, but because their architecture made everything impossibly slow to build.
The irony is stark: microservices are meant to increase development speed, but they often do the opposite for small teams. You’re optimizing for problems you don’t have while creating new ones you can’t afford to solve.
The organizational mismatch
Microservices work best when each service has a dedicated team. Conway’s Law tells us that software architecture mirrors communication patterns. If your five-person startup tries to maintain fifteen services, you’re fighting against fundamental organizational principles.
Large companies use microservices because they have specialized teams for tooling, DevOps, and service maintenance. Your startup probably doesn’t. You’re asking the same developers who build features to also become distributed systems experts.
Start with a monolith, evolve thoughtfully
Build your initial product as a well-structured monolith. Use clear module boundaries and dependency injection. Design internal APIs as if they might become external services later. This gives you the architectural benefits of microservices without the operational overhead.
When you actually need to scale—when you have real performance bottlenecks, large teams, or truly independent domains—you can extract services along the boundaries you’ve already established. Companies like Segment have successfully moved back from microservices to monoliths when the costs outweighed the benefits.
Know when to make the switch
Consider microservices when you have:
- Genuine scaling bottlenecks that can’t be solved within a monolith
- Teams large enough to dedicate ownership to individual services
- Operational maturity to handle distributed systems complexity
- Different technology requirements for different parts of your system
Until then, focus on building a modular, well-tested monolith. Your users care about features that solve their problems, not your architectural choices. Don’t let resume-driven development or cargo-cult practices slow down the work that actually matters.
The best architecture is the one that lets you ship value to customers quickly and reliably. For most startups, that’s a monolith—at least until you’ve earned the right to complain about its limitations.