Exactly!! I still think that people do not think enough about the cost of NOT scaling nowadays. And especially, what is it going to cost when I can't scale and

Exactly!! I still think that people do not think enough about the cost of NOT scaling nowadays. And especially, what is it going to cost when I can't scale and I have to change course. I recently heard a podcast where they said: "choosing a distributed databases is probably premature optimization right?", I was pretty surprised. A startup often sells a better user experience. Although less important for US startups since US is a big market, international start-ups won't get many clients further away from their country if the latencies increase signficantly so distributed databases is something you might desire anyway. Secondly they might indeed end up losing clients if they break down due to scaling issues. And at that point, if they want to keep their clients, the options are limited, 1. they'll have to go through a risky deploy to change the database, 2. try to scale it yourself by creating multiple replicas with all problems and technical depth that might bring, finally maybe still losing your clients if you fail and maybe ending up to pay more due to overprovisioning. 3. Accept that clients complain or leave. I would choose FaunaDB or Spanner for my startup personally.