Microservices are an organisational tool, not a shortcut for solo founders. Most MVPs fail on distribution, not on modular deployment.
Stay monolithic until you have clear scaling pain, separate teams or compliance zones that force a split.
Costs of splitting early
- Distributed tracing and logging across services.
- Contract testing between APIs.
- Slower local development.
- Harder onboarding for the client's future team.
Modular monolith pattern
Keep one deployable unit but enforce module folders: billing, core domain, notifications. Extract a service when a module needs independent scaling or release cadence.
Use this as a working checklist inside your team first. When the same steps repeat every week and spreadsheets start breaking, that is usually the moment to scope a decision map covering product value, frequency, integration needs and ownership risk as an owned system. See the relevant Standen service · More guides · SaaS ops audit.