Why Experts Say Startups Should Build a Monolith Before Microservices

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Many early-stage teams adopt microservices architectures before they have the user base or complexity to justify them, spending weeks on infrastructure instead of building their core product. A monolith — a single deployable application with one codebase, one database, and one place to debug — allows faster development, simpler onboarding, and lower infrastructure costs at the early stage. Companies like Instagram, GitHub, and Shopify all started with or continue to rely on monolithic architectures, demonstrating the approach can scale further than commonly assumed. Engineers often mistake poor code structure for a monolith's shortcoming, but distributing badly designed code across microservices only spreads the problem rather than solving it. Experts recommend starting with a well-structured modular monolith and migrating individual components to independent services only when specific business needs — such as independent team deployments or divergent scaling requirements — genuinely demand it.

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