Continuing this reasoning...
As soon as your startup does get big, it starts to make more sense to try and migrate to 'dumb' machines and save on infrastructure costs, especially if your business is low margin and your infrastructure costs are high.
As soon as your startup does get big, it starts to make more sense to try and migrate to 'dumb' machines and save on infrastructure costs, especially if your business is low margin and your infrastructure costs are high.
You can almost certainly fit all your business logic into one or two appengine apps, and fit all your data into one database. While you have just a few programmers, the fact they're all sharing a process with eachother won't matter.
The goal is working product and paying customers ASAP, not a nicely architected microservices backend 2 years from now.
Yes, it'll end up being a mess when the company has pivoted and changed directions a bunch of times, and when you finally come to get to 50M users+ scale you'll probably have to rewrite from scratch. But by then, you ought to be rewriting from scratch, because you won't know the true requirements till you get to that scale.
And adding one dev/engineer is _massively_ more expensive, so you seldom want to scale in that axis when the option is to, say, use a managed database or even a complete data pipeline.