Why Startups And Indiedevs Should Choose Monolith First, Lessons... (2026)

Let’s get the confession out of the way: I’ve shipped production monoliths in 2024, and I’d do it again. Not because I don’t know how to build microservices, but because, for most new products, the monolith is still the pragmatic, cost-effective, and developer-friendly choice.

You’re moving fast, with a team of five (on a good day, when nobody’s out sick). Features need shipping, customers need onboarding, and “go-to-market” means the code you write today might be the demo tomorrow.

One of the biggest myths is that monoliths are always spaghetti code. That’s only true if you let it happen. In .NET, it’s straightforward to apply Clean Architecture principles inside a monolith. You get separation of concerns, testable business logic, and clear boundaries without the cost of splitting everything into separate deployables.

The build and deployment pipeline? One repo, one CI/CD job, no cross-service version drift.

Microservice hype loves to tell you every API must be versioned from day one. In a monolith, your API is internal. Even your external-facing endpoints can evolve rapidly because you control the only client.

Don’t over-engineer for backward compatibility before you have users depending on your endpoints.

Build what you need, evolve quickly, and only add versioning when real consumers demand it.

Error handling and validation should be explicit, not abstracted away to a middleware nobody remembers exists.

React frontends consuming monolith APIs have clear advantages:

You own both sides, so you can break contracts (carefully) without weeks of negotiation.

Source: Dev.to