[rajin444]

Isn't a mix of fat models and services best? Say for a user model you have first name, middle, and last name. You add a property "full_name" that joins those 3. Putting that logic in a service feels confusing and unintuitive.

On the other end, if you have a complex auth mechanism that needs to talk to several external APIs, putting that in a service feels natural. You're making remote API calls, possibly pulling in other models, and it's a clearly defined "business area".

[skrtskrt]

In my opinion and experience, treating the model as anything but a way to talk to the database behind a service interface is a very slippery slope.

My service methods receive and return pure objects (pydantic or attrs) that I serialize from the models. No other part of the app gets to pass around that service’s model, updating it willy nilly, maybe saving the updates, maybe not.

The service completely hides the model and all corresponding persistence logic behind its interface.

The decoupling you achieve is worth the extra boilerplate. It’s the only way I have ever seen Django apps not become giant balls of mud.