1. As you said yourself, django no-rel basically means you're stuck with a version of django that is 2 point releases old and will have to forgo all future rele

1. As you said yourself, django no-rel basically means you're stuck with a version of django that is 2 point releases old and will have to forgo all future releases of django for the foreseeable future. 2. Using mongoose, however, means you throw out the admin ui and any other apps that use django's orm. At this point, I think it is very clear that you have 4 feasible options: 1. Use Django with mongoose. 2. Use a lighter framework like Flask, since you kind of lose most of django's benefits when you throw out the django orm. 3. Use Django with SQL (preferably postgres) 4. Use some other language (Ruby?) I recommend that if you really want to use Mongo you should use a framework like Flask. Otherwise I recommend you use SQL and stick with vanilla Django. Worry about scaling when it becomes a problem. Scaling is a problem you want to have! When I was working at a startup I wish our main problem was scaling (versus finding product market fit). Don't prematurely optimize.