Why Most SaaS Teams Should Skip Kubernetes and Start With a Simple VM

A guide from the Full Stack SaaS Masterclass series argues that small engineering teams should choose deployment infrastructure based on current needs, not anticipated future scale. The article outlines three tiers of deployment targets: a single VM running Docker Compose, managed container platforms like AWS ECS Fargate or Google Cloud Run, and Kubernetes. Most early-stage SaaS products are advised to start with a VM setup fronted by Caddy or Nginx, which can reliably serve real paying customers without complex overhead. Kubernetes is flagged as a tool that solves genuine problems only at scale, but carries steep operational costs — including RBAC, network policies, and cluster management — that most SaaS teams never actually need. The piece also stresses building a single artifact once and promoting it through environments, warning that building separately for staging and production can cause subtle but serious inconsistencies.