[echelon]

If your application has different load or resource requirements, you should build separate services, even in a startup.

You can put most of your crud and domain logic in a monolith, but if you have a GPU workload or something that has very different requirements - that should be its own thing. That pattern shouldn't result in 100 services to maintain, but probably only a few boundaries.

Bias for monolith for everything, but know when you need to carve something out as its own.

At scale, you're 100% correct.