Choosing and Combining Services
No single managed service does everything well. Successful applications combine services strategically, choosing each for its strengths while managing the complexity of integration. The challenge is making choices you won't regret as your application grows.
Evaluation Criteria
When comparing services, consider these factors:
Features vs. needs — Does the service solve your actual problem? A feature-rich platform you don't need adds complexity without benefit. Start with what you need today, not what you might need someday.
Pricing model and scale — Understand how costs grow. Some services charge per request, others per user, others per storage. Model your expected usage and project costs at different scales. A cheap service at 100 users might become expensive at 100,000.
Lock-in risk — How hard is it to leave? Proprietary query languages, custom APIs, and non-exportable data increase switching costs. Open standards and standard protocols reduce risk.
Team familiarity — A service your team knows beats a "better" service nobody understands. Learning curves cost time and introduce bugs.
Community and support — Active communities mean better documentation, more Stack Overflow answers, and faster bug fixes. Check GitHub issues, Discord servers, and forum activity.
Common Service Combinations
Here's how teams typically combine services:
Startup stack:
├── Supabase (database + auth)
├── Vercel (hosting)
├── Resend (email)
└── Cloudinary (images)
Enterprise stack:
├── AWS RDS (database)
├── Auth0 (auth)
├── AWS S3 (storage)
└── CloudFront (CDN)
The startup stack prioritizes developer experience and quick iteration. The enterprise stack prioritizes control, compliance, and established vendors.
Planning for Migration
Even with careful choices, requirements change. Plan for eventual migration:
Data export — Can you get your data out? In what format? Some services make export easy; others make it painful. Test exports before you're locked in.
API compatibility — Services using standard protocols (PostgreSQL wire protocol, S3 API) are easier to replace. Proprietary APIs require more rewriting.
Cost of switching — Beyond technical work, consider downtime, testing, and the risk of bugs during migration. Sometimes staying with a suboptimal service costs less than switching.
Making Decisions
Document your choices and reasoning. Future you (or your teammates) will want to know why you picked service X over service Y. Record the alternatives considered, the deciding factors, and any concerns you accepted.
Start simple. You can always add services later, but removing them is harder. A monolithic approach with one or two services often beats a complex microservices architecture for early-stage applications.