The founder was proud. "We've built a microservices architecture," he told me, his voice full of accomplishment. "Sixteen services, each independently deployable. Enterprise-grade."
I looked at his team. Three developers.
Sixteen services. Three people.
That's when I realized he'd built a prison for himself.
The Myth of Microservices
Somewhere along the way, microservices became synonymous with "grown-up engineering." Like using Kubernetes or writing code in Rust or having a Chief Architect.
The logic seems sound: big companies use microservices, big companies are successful, therefore microservices will make us successful.
But that's not how it works.
Microservices are a solution to a specific problem: coordinating large teams working on large codebases. When you have fifty engineers, each working on different features, you can't have them all stepping on each other in a single codebase. So you split the system into services, each owned by a different team, each deployable independently.
That's the problem microservices solve.
If you don't have that problem, microservices create problems instead.
What Microservices Actually Cost
A startup with three developers and sixteen services doesn't have an architecture. They have a part-time job.
Each service needs:
- Its own repository
- Its own CI/CD pipeline
- Its own monitoring and alerting
- Its own on-call rotation
- Its own documentation
- Its own security considerations
Multiply that by sixteen, and you've created a full-time DevOps team. Except you don't have a DevOps team. You have three developers who wanted to build a product.
I've watched startups spend more time managing their microservices than building their product. I've watched deployment times increase because every change needs to coordinate across services. I've watched debugging become a nightmare because a single user request touches ten services and nobody knows where the problem is.
That's not scalability. That's masochism.
When Microservices Actually Make Sense
I'm not anti-microservices. I'm anti-premature-microservices.
There are times when microservices are the right choice:
When you have multiple teams, each owning a distinct domain. When different services have radically different scaling requirements. When different parts of the system have different technology needs. When you're big enough that the coordination cost of a monolith exceeds the coordination cost of distributed systems.
But here's the key: those conditions are true for a fraction of startups. And they become true gradually, not all at once.
A healthtech startup I worked with went from monolith to microservices over two years. They started with a single codebase. As their team grew, as different features developed different requirements, as they needed to scale different parts of their system independently—that's when they started extracting services.
One at a time. When they actually needed it. Not because they wanted to feel like a big company.
The Monolith Advantage
Here's what most founders don't realize: a well-organized monolith is better than a poorly-organized microservices architecture.
A monolith means:
- One codebase to understand
- One deployment to manage
- Easy refactoring
- Simple debugging
- No network latency between services
- Everything in one place
The startup that builds a clean monolith and iterates quickly will beat the startup that builds a distributed system and spends all its time managing infrastructure.
I worked with a fintech startup that stayed on a monolith for four years. Four years! By startup standards, that's practically ancient. They processed millions of transactions. They had a team of fifteen engineers. And they finally extracted their first service last year—not because microservices were their goal, but because one part of their system actually had different scaling needs than everything else.
That's how you do it. Not because you read about it in a blog post, but because your actual business needs it.
The Real Question
Instead of "Should I use microservices?", ask:
"What's the actual problem I'm trying to solve?"
If the problem is "I want my system to scale," a monolith will scale further than you think. I've seen monoliths handle millions of users. The limits are higher than most people imagine.
If the problem is "I want to be able to deploy independently," that's valid. But you can also achieve independent deployment with a well-organized monolith using feature flags or modular Monorepo patterns.
If the problem is "My team is stepping on each other," maybe you need better processes before you need better architecture.
If the problem is "I want to use different technologies for different parts," you can do that in a monolith too.
The architecture should solve your actual problems, not the problems you're worried about having someday.
The Pattern I've Seen
After years of watching startups make this decision, here's what I've noticed:
The startups that succeed with microservices are the ones that grew into them. They started simple, learned their actual requirements, and extracted services when the pain of a monolith exceeded the pain of microservices.
The startups that fail with microservices are the ones that started with them. They built for a scale they never reached. They managed infrastructure they didn't need. And they spent their early days building systems instead of building products.
The question isn't whether microservices are good. The question is whether you need them yet.
The Bottom Line
Microservices are a tool. Not a goal. Not a status symbol. Just a tool.
Use them when they solve a problem you actually have. Don't use them because they feel like what a successful company would do.
And if you're not sure, start with a monolith. You can always split things apart later. It's much harder to put them back together.
Need Help With Your Architecture?
At Startupbricks, we help startups build architectures that match their actual needs—not their imagined ones. If you're trying to figure out whether microservices make sense for you, let's talk.