Why the Best Startups Still Use Monoliths

You ever work on a microservices project so over-engineered it needed a separate service just to tell you if another service was alive?

Yeah. Me too.

I’ve lost count of how many startups I’ve consulted for, or advised; each one proudly introducing me to their brand-new, decomposed, “infinitely scalable” microservices setup. And every time, I’d quietly think: This is going to collapse in six months. Not because the idea’s bad. Microservices have their place. But that place usually isn’t “three people in a WeWork with a half-broken MVP and no paying customers.”

The irony? The best startups I’ve seen — the ones that actually made it, shipped consistently, and didn’t spend their seed round on infra no one needed — used monoliths.

Yes, monoliths. The supposed dinosaurs of software architecture.

Monoliths Are Not the Enemy

Somewhere along the way, the word “monolith” became a slur. It’s like calling someone “legacy.” Instant side-eye. But, most people dunking on monoliths have never built anything past CRUD. Meanwhile, the startups that actually get users, revenue, and traction are often shipping entire businesses on a single repo with a Postgres backend and a big ‘ol service folder.

And it works. Gloriously.

Monoliths aren’t the enemy. Premature complexity is.

The Myth of “Scalability”

Startups love to tell themselves they’re building for scale. “What if we get a million users overnight?” they ask, while their signup form is still broken and nobody’s logging in.

Let’s get real.

Most startups don’t need to scale. They need to exist. They need to survive long enough to figure out what they’re even building. They need to change direction quickly, deploy daily (or hourly), and not spend their days untangling service meshes or debugging why a gRPC call failed between two containers that live on the same box.

In those early days, flexibility trumps scalability. Simplicity beats elegance. Working code that you can understand > distributed code that makes you cry.

Fast, Focused, and Shipping

You know what happens when you build a monolith?

You finish things.

You don’t waste three days figuring out if auth belongs in a separate service. You don’t write YAML for a living. You don’t spin up five repos and call it “architecture.” You just… build the damn feature.

That’s why the best teams — especially the senior ones — default to monoliths. Because they’ve already done the microservices dance. They know what it costs. And they know it’s not worth it unless you’re already at scale.

Early Facebook? Monolith. Early GitHub? Monolith. Even Amazon started as a monolith before they earned the right to break it apart.

The Cost of Microservices Is Never Just Technical

Everyone talks about service boundaries and scalability. No one talks about morale.

Try onboarding a new engineer into a forest of 40 microservices, half of which don’t have docs and none of which are named sensibly. Watch their soul quietly leave their body.

Then compare that to dropping them into a clean, readable monolith. A place where they can search for a function and actually find it. A place where “running the app” doesn’t require three shell scripts and an exorcism.

People underestimate just how much architecture affects velocity. And microservices? Unless they’re absolutely necessary, they tend to slow you down. Culturally. Logistically. Mentally.

You Can Always Split It Later

Monoliths are reversible. Microservices aren’t.

If your monolith gets too big? Cool. Pull a part out. Extract it when it starts to hurt, and only after you’ve seen the seams. That’s how good software evolves: Organically, not in some architecture diagram dreamed up before your first customer ever showed up.

You don’t future-proof your startup by guessing. You future-proof it by staying alive, staying fast, and staying sane.

Final Thoughts

So no, monoliths aren’t outdated. They’re underrated. They’re not the default because you’re lazy, they’re the default because you’re smart.

Because you’re building a startup, not a distributed systems thesis.

Because you know tech isn’t about what’s cool. It’s about what works.

And because one day, when you do hit that mythical scale, you’ll have the money, the team, and the context to break things apart the right way.

Until then?

Ship fast. Stay lean. Long live the monolith.