Start with a monolith. Split it when you have a reason.
Microservices architecture gets sold to startups as a scalability solution. It's an organizational solution that creates infrastructure overhead that startups can't afford. Understanding when a well-structured monolith is the right architecture and when microservices become necessary.
Architecture decision between monolith and microservices — often influenced by cargo-culting Netflix's architecture without Netflix's problems
Microservices architecture was developed at Amazon, Netflix, and Google to solve a specific problem: large engineering organizations where teams need to deploy independently without coordinating with every other team. It's an organizational solution as much as a technical one.
The startup microservices mistake: adopting the architecture designed for 50+ engineering teams when you have 2.
What microservices actually require:
- Separate deployment pipelines for each service
- Service discovery and inter-service communication (HTTP, gRPC, or message queue)
- Distributed tracing to debug issues that span services
- Data consistency strategy across service databases (no ACID transactions across services)
- Infrastructure overhead proportional to the service count
For a 2-person team: each of these is overhead that slows feature development. A bug that spans two services in a microservices setup takes longer to debug than a bug in a monolith.
The modular monolith: A single deployable application where code is organized into modules (auth, billing, users, notifications) with clear boundaries. Modules don't directly depend on each other's internals; they communicate through defined interfaces. When a module needs to become a service (for independent scaling or independent deployment), it can be extracted — but only when that need exists.
When to extract a service:
- Different scaling requirements (a real-time WebSocket service needs different infrastructure than the web server)
- Different deployment cadence (a data processing job shouldn't share deployment with the main app)
- Compliance isolation (PCI-scoped services isolated from the main application)
- Team ownership boundaries (dedicated team taking responsibility for a subdomain)
Architecture selection that matches the team size and scale — starting with a modular monolith and extracting services only when the organization and scale justify it
Well-structured Next.js monoliths with clear module boundaries. Services extracted when the scale and organization justify it — not as a default architecture.
One honest number to start.
Fixed-scope, fixed-price. The number below is the starting point — final scope is built from your brief.
Architecture selection that matches the team size and scale — starting with a modular monolith and extracting services only when the organization and scale justify it
Three steps, every time.
The same repeatable engagement on every project. No surprises, no mystery, no billable ambiguity.
Brief & discovery.
We send you questions, then get on a call. Output: a written scope with every step, feature, and integration listed.
Build & ship.
Fixed schedule, weekly reviews. No scope creep unless you change the scope — and if you do, we reprice it transparently.
Warranty & retainer.
30-day warranty on every launch. Most clients stay on a monthly retainer for ongoing features and maintenance.
Why Fixed-Price Matters Here
Architecture decision is made at project start. The scope is built around the selected architecture.
Questions, answered.
A well-structured monolith with clear module boundaries can be extracted incrementally. The extraction is cheaper than the upfront cost of building a microservices architecture prematurely.
Amazon's rule for when microservices make organizational sense. At startup scale, you don't have enough teams.
Tell Ryel about your project.
Describe what you’re building and what outcome you need. You’ll have a written, fixed-price scope within the week.