I don't think you need to own your own platform. It's a trade-off decision between total cost of ownership and your time. You can buy a new server with enough p

I don't think you need to own your own platform. It's a trade-off decision between total cost of ownership and your time. You can buy a new server with enough power to be able to serve everybody even during huge spikes but it's expensive, however relatively maintenance-free. You can have and old PC with low upfront costs but old consumer-grade hardware breaks down and you have to maintain it (sometimes we have to speak about "preventive maintenance"). Or you can put your things into a VPS or cloud for the price of electricity and a good internet connection alone (at least in my country, prices really are THAT low). If you don't vendor-lock yourself in you can then move your things from one VPS/cloud to another. And you don't even have to start with Kubernetes cluster upfront. You can start with "old-school" "bare metal + operating system with root access" server, then move your application behind a load balancer, then to Docker/K8s when it grows. I see so many projects suffocating to death by "thinking big". I even encountered an e-commerce site which didn't even had a proper payment gateways, well, Cash on Delivery services still exist today. Not ideal but it worked (and the goods arrived OK). But I'm not telling to "own your platform", that's BS nowadays. "Always have a way out" is much better. Start small and right-size often.