That's a bit of survivor bias: Most startups don't go from small to large, or even really medium. Most startups are strapped for resources. Paying an extra engi

That's a bit of survivor bias: Most startups don't go from small to large, or even really medium. Most startups are strapped for resources. Paying an extra engineer, or taking valuable time away from an existing one to implement an extremely scalable infrastructure that might not be used. They should focus on shipping a good product that people want, and getting people to buy it. I can't think of startups that failed because their stack needed to be upgraded for scalability. It's generally not why startups fail. I can find a whole lot who burned through their cash before they had a chance to need something orders of magnitude larger in scale than currently necessary. If it's a minimal cost in time & money? Sure, go for high scalability. But it it's going to reduce your runway significantly then worry about the bigger problem of becoming successful enough to need it in the first place. If a startup is really concerned about avoiding the problems you're encountering at your company they should just take an extra week when planning their infrastructure to map out details of how they would transition to a more scalable infrastructure. Then save that file somewhere and dust it off if they ever need it. And if they need it, they'll have ample investment money coming their way to pay for the transition.