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> It's cheaper

> You will need a backend anyway. It'll need to expose data to users. Exposing it as HTML is no harder than doing it via JSON or GraphQL

Sure, if your "app" is just buttons and UI that interacts with a backend DB, I agree. However, many PWAs and native apps do lots of heavy lifting on the client side, and loading the backend with that is not cheap at all!

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Yeah, I don't get how it'd be cheaper at all. Yes you need a backend anyway, but unless you're not paying for usage and have spare CPU cycles and bandwidth available, it's not cheaper. It's cheaper to send your frontend html+js and let the browser cache it so it's only sent once, and let the frontend pull only the data it needs to render the html. The backend isn't having to process a template, or resend similar html constantly to the frontend since most of that likely cannot be cached.

I don't get it either. I suspect it's investor hype, just like they hyped using "the cloud" which is also a huge money waster

exactly, exposing the backend with HTML is harder, if that is supposed to mean the complete interface which includes CSS and javascript. without interface it would just be XML, at which point JSON would be the better choice.

even more, many backends can be simple CRUD. i reuse my backend for all websites and haven't had to do any custom backend coding in years. so my current backend cost is zero, because i can do it all in the frontend.

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