Even at small scales, speed is extremely important! I don't know if it's still true, but I talked to an engineer at SmartyStreets several years ago, and they said they could serve up 100,000 requests per second on a Raspberry Pi. At the time I didn't believe them, but since then I've developed several systems that could absolutely do that.

At small companies, every dollar counts. You could save a bajillion dollars by serving up all your traffic on an AWS micro or small instance, instead of larger machines!

So even at small scales, it's worth figuring out how to make things fast. That makes scaling later much easier!