[londons_explore]

Continuing this reasoning...

As soon as your startup does get big, it starts to make more sense to try and migrate to 'dumb' machines and save on infrastructure costs, especially if your business is low margin and your infrastructure costs are high.

[spott]

The flip side is that when you are small, you probably don’t need all the fancy managed services that AWS offers. Simpler solutions can save you money and time.

[londons_explore]

I'm a big proponent of appengine/heroku and similar platforms for small startups.

You can almost certainly fit all your business logic into one or two appengine apps, and fit all your data into one database. While you have just a few programmers, the fact they're all sharing a process with eachother won't matter.

The goal is working product and paying customers ASAP, not a nicely architected microservices backend 2 years from now.

Yes, it'll end up being a mess when the company has pivoted and changed directions a bunch of times, and when you finally come to get to 50M users+ scale you'll probably have to rewrite from scratch. But by then, you ought to be rewriting from scratch, because you won't know the true requirements till you get to that scale.

[jojobas]

Unfortunately by that time you're mired in EKS, SQS, EFS and whatever other 3-letter services, unpicking which is more expensive than months of operation on AWS.

[rcarmo]

And then all of a sudden you run into more engineering costs. Companies use platform services because one dev/engineer can do a lot more on their own and focus on delivering business value rather than twiddle knobs.

And adding one dev/engineer is _massively_ more expensive, so you seldom want to scale in that axis when the option is to, say, use a managed database or even a complete data pipeline.

[joshstrange]

I agree, that's mostly because the usage patterns have become apparent and you know what features you need and what to optimise for. That's why I prefer managed services to start and then can self-host once price or needs pushes me to.

[JeremyTheo]

Agreed! See also the ahrefs example