It's not just the test suite that is the subject of tradeoffs. One may write good code that fundamentally doesn't scale beyond a small number of customers e.g.

It's not just the test suite that is the subject of tradeoffs. One may write good code that fundamentally doesn't scale beyond a small number of customers e.g. doing everything with postgres and no batching because it's easy. Or building a solution for a demo to an individual customer. These solutions will break, and if monitoring is skipped will break at 2 AM when customers really start using the product. These situations can be avoided with better product research and a stronger emphasis on design, but these are also the approaches large established companies take who can't afford to lose customer trust, and will gladly build a product on a 2 year time horizon. As a startup you need to weigh the risk of failure, the need for direct customer engagement, and limited resources against the risk of losing customer trust. If you're a startup making a new DB, then you're product lifespan is approximately equal to the time until your first high level customer failure or poor jepsen test. A new consumer startup, may simply be able to patch scaling issues as they emerge rather than investing in a billion user infra from the get go.