The most expensive infrastructure mistake early-stage startups make is spending engineering time on infrastructure problems before there is a product worth running on that infrastructure.
One cloud provider. Managed database: Supabase, PlanetScale, or RDS. Container hosting that does not require a DevOps engineer: Railway, Render, or Cloud Run. GitHub Actions for CI/CD. One monitoring tool: Sentry for errors.
Supabase provides a Postgres database, authentication, file storage, and edge functions in a single managed service. The engineering cost to replicate this manually is two to three weeks. The pattern: managed service for the first 100K users, self-managed when the economics justify it.
Multi-cloud is valid for companies with specific compliance requirements. For everyone else, it is complexity without meaningful benefit. Build on one cloud. Revisit the multi-cloud question when you have a specific, concrete reason to need it.
Your managed service costs exceed what you would pay for self-managed. You have compliance requirements the managed service cannot meet. You have a dedicated platform engineer who owns infrastructure as their primary responsibility.
Axented helps early-stage teams set up infrastructure that scales without over-engineering it. → axented.com/platform-infrastructure
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