> 1. its hard From my experience, building an offline-first app is much easier than a traditional client-server app. I maintain an authentication backend for

> 1. its hard From my experience, building an offline-first app is much easier than a traditional client-server app. I maintain an authentication backend for PouchDB/CouchDB-based apps and have received this feedback multiple times: It only requires a little bit of frontend web dev knowledge to store and retrieve JSONs locally + sync them up, without having to worry about authentication, API design, network connection or caching. > 2. its a significant dev cost It allows to move much faster than a traditional setup where frontend devs might need to sit in meetings with backend devs in order to argue about some API design. But early mistakes in the data model are much harder to fix because with CouchDB, your data model is your API. Having built apps with Pouch/Couch for > 4 years now, I think the perfect middle ground is to only accept changes made by a user through an API (proper data validation, no conflicts,...) and to use Pouch/Couch in a read-only manner, replicating all necessary user data to the client.