Ever feel like modern SaaS stacks are a house of cards waiting to collapse? Let’s talk about it.
Remember when building a web app meant setting up a server and coding your features? Now it’s a juggling act of specialized services. Authentication with Clerk, databases split between Supabase and Neon, Pusher for real-time, Trigger[dot]dev for background jobs, Upstash for Redis, and don’t forget choosing between Vercel or Netlify for deployment.
I recently consulted on a project where the team spent more time integrating services than building core features. Halfway through, one service changed its pricing model, throwing the budget into chaos. Another had an outage that brought development to a screeching halt. It was a mess.
Here’s the kicker: most of this complexity is unnecessary. With AWS and a solid Node.js backend (maybe on a DigitalOcean droplet or Cloudflare worker), you can achieve the same results more reliably. Are we afraid of writing backend code now? Or just addicted to shiny new tools?
Don’t get me wrong, these services have their place. But blindly adopting every new SaaS offering is a recipe for disaster. What happens when one shuts down or has a critical failure? Your app becomes a house of cards.
Let’s bring back the art of building robust, self-contained systems. It’s time to ask ourselves: are we engineering solutions, or just piecing together services and hoping for the best?
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” – Leonardo da Vinci
What’s your take? Are we overcomplicating our stacks, or is this the new normal we should embrace?
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