Why the Best Startups Still Use Monoliths
Despite the hype around microservices, many successful startups choose monoliths to ship faster, reduce complexity, and stay agile in the…
Microservices may be trendy, but the smartest startups are quietly scaling with monoliths — and for good reason.
Why the Best Startups Still Use Monoliths
Despite the hype around microservices, many successful startups choose monoliths to ship faster, reduce complexity, and stay agile in the early stages. Here’s why that decision still works in 2025.
Microservices are the darling of modern software architecture. Everyone seems to be talking about them. Every conference, every podcast, every blog — all echo the same message: break things apart.
And sure, for tech giants like Netflix, Amazon, or Uber, microservices make sense. But here’s a hot take that might surprise you:
Some of the best startups out there are deliberately choosing monoliths.
And no — it’s not because they lack technical chops.
It’s because they’re playing a smarter, leaner, and more focused game.
In this article, we’ll explore why monoliths are still a solid choice for early-stage startups, how they give you a competitive edge, and when it actually makes sense to consider splitting things up.
1. Speed > Scalability (at the start)
When you’re building a startup, your number one priority is to ship — fast. You want to get your MVP into users’ hands as soon as possible. Every hour spent designing service boundaries, setting up inter-service communication, or handling distributed transactions is time not spent on your core product.
A monolith lets you:
Make changes in one place.
Test your entire app in a single environment.
Deploy everything together in minutes.
In short: it’s faster to build, test, and iterate. And speed is your lifeline in the early days.
2. You Don’t Have a Scale Problem (Yet)
Let’s be honest — if you’re pre-product-market fit, or serving your first few hundred (or thousand) users, you don’t need to worry about scaling like Google.
Many startups jump to microservices too soon, prematurely optimizing for problems they don’t have.
What you do have are limited resources: a small team, tight deadlines, and a rapidly changing product.
A well-structured monolith can easily scale to support millions of users. Twitter ran on a monolithic Ruby on Rails app for years.
Basecamp still does. Shopify does too. And they’re doing just fine.
3. Microservices Multiply Complexity
Yes, microservices offer better separation of concerns, but they come with a heavy trade-off:
Network latency and failures
Complex deployment pipelines
Distributed logging and tracing
Versioning and backward compatibility
Security between services
Startups don’t need that headache. When you’re still validating your idea and shipping weekly updates, managing ten services and a message bus is a massive overkill.
Complexity slows you down. Monoliths keep things simple.
4. Team Size Matters
Microservices make sense when you have large teams that need to work independently.
If you’ve got three engineers and a product manager, you don’t need service boundaries.
You need to sit together (or Slack together), write code in one repo, and deploy it quickly.
A monolith gives your small team a single source of truth. One codebase. One test suite. One deployment target.
That’s agility. And agility is your competitive advantage.
5. Refactoring Later Is Easier Than You Think
One of the biggest fears is: “What if we outgrow the monolith?”
Spoiler alert: That’s a good problem to have.
If your startup gets to the point where your monolith becomes painful, congratulations — you’ve got traction, funding, and likely a larger team. Now you can afford to invest in breaking it apart thoughtfully.
And if you built your monolith well — with clear boundaries, modular structure, and decoupled components — migrating to services later won’t be that hard.
“Do things that don’t scale. Then scale them when it hurts.” — Paul Graham
6. Monoliths Are Easier to Onboard
Every hour a new engineer spends understanding your architecture is an hour not spent building features or fixing bugs.
Monoliths are simpler to reason about. There’s one app to clone, one database to understand, and one way to run the whole thing locally.
That makes onboarding fast, especially for small startups where every engineer matters.
7. You Can Still Have Modularity Inside a Monolith
Let’s bust a myth: Monolith ≠ Mess.
Modern monoliths can (and should) be modular. You can structure your codebase using domains, packages, or even internal services. Frameworks like Django, Rails, and Laravel encourage this kind of clean separation.
So you get the best of both worlds:
The simplicity of a monolith
The clarity and modularity of a microservice-inspired structure
Final Thoughts
The hype around microservices is real — and for the right reasons. But for many startups, jumping into microservices is like hiring a 10-piece orchestra to play a simple lullaby.
A well-crafted monolith is faster to build, easier to maintain, and more aligned with what early-stage startups actually need.
So if you’re building the next big thing, don’t be ashamed of starting monolithic.
The best startups aren’t choosing monoliths out of ignorance — they’re choosing them out of wisdom.
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Let’s bring the monoliths back — one well-reasoned decision at a time.
