Speed Now Versus Control Later
Lenny Bogdonoff, co-founder and CTO of Milk Video, on the past, present and future of Javascript
The real trade here is not cheap versus expensive infrastructure, it is speed now versus control later. Managed back end tools let a front end developer ship login, database reads, and file storage in a weekend, but once an app needs richer data models, more users, or tighter cost control, the company starts paying a large markup for convenience that a small Rails or Laravel app with MySQL could handle much more predictably.
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Jamstack hosting and Jamstack back end services break in different places. The hosting layer on Vercel or Netlify is usually fine at scale, while the sharper pain shows up in database, auth, and API abstraction layers like Firebase, where usage based pricing and product limits rise fast as the app gets more complex.
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What the company is really buying is fewer specialist hires. Vercel, Netlify, Firebase, and similar tools package deploys, previews, serverless functions, auth, and scaling so a small team can avoid hiring DevOps or backend staff early. That is why these products win with startups even when the underlying cloud would be cheaper to run directly.
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The next wave of tools tries to keep the easy developer workflow while reducing the migration pain. Supabase is a good example, it offers Firebase style setup speed but on top of Postgres, which gives teams a more standard relational database and a cleaner path to more sophisticated apps than a document store centered stack.
Going forward, the winning platforms will be the ones that keep the one person team workflow but swap proprietary abstractions for more standard building blocks. As edge functions, managed Postgres, and open source back end layers mature, the market is moving toward tools that still remove infrastructure work without forcing a painful rebuild once a project becomes a real business.