[manquer]

That is a big “IF” . 99.99% side projects are not successful, you should not be planning architecture expecting to win the lottery .

Even if you did, on premise self-hosting does not save from scaling costs or problems .

If you are successful with firebase , all you get is the bill, firebase will definitely scale without sweat or intervention, for most businesses (side or small) that is better tradeoff .

If you are successful with a self hosted solution , you are likely to be down when the peak traffic or hug of death hits that is when you need it most to work, the app will fail.

This is even assuming intimate expertise on how to scale quickly and having many done it many times before with no mis steps and no researching on what to do.

A professionally managed service at firebase level which is shared infra has already both the capacity and code tuned to scale for any one tenant without effort or lag .

Self hosted infra is optimized for cost and usage pattern of one small tenant, no matter how good your scale out skills and autoscaling code is , there is going be a lag between you and something like firebase which will never notice your spike and issues around it.

This is the crux of success behind multi-tenant IaaS and PaaS, the reason Amazon opened up their infra to the world originally.

All the way even to Amazon.com scale of SRE skills and budgets, hosting on AWS will always be better and cheaper for them than using isolated infra only for them given their load pattern fluctuates pretty heavily .

Amazon.com would still run AWS even if was losing money a bit ,because it would make them more resilient and their infra costs cheaper .

The best analogy I have heard is it similar to insurance, works better with more and more users with diverse usage and risk patterns

[999900000999]

For me the answer is much simpler.

I find coding backends to be very boring. It's just not something I want to do during my spare time.

Managed infra is almost always easier to get going.

[manquer]

Coding CRUD and repeating patterns tends to be boring, however writing interesting logic in backend tends to be interesting.

Generated CRUD interfaces with basics like authentication etc is pretty much easy these days, whether Supabase, Hasura, PostgREST style self hostable stacks or just Firebase, even collaborative data structure basics for CRDTs don't need to be built each time and are available out of the box.

Frontend can get repetitive too, a lot of components keep getting built and redone differently, interesting stuff which makes the tech be core part of the product differentiator such as say how WASM is used at Figma is the real interesting part in frontend.