Why Your Kubernetes Setup Is Burning Money

Most startups don't need Kubernetes. If you're pre-Series A and running K8s, you're probably burning $5K-$15K per month on infrastructure complexity that's actively slowing you down.

The Kubernetes Trap

Here's what happens: Your technical co-founder reads that "all modern apps run on Kubernetes." Your lead engineer wants it on their resume. Your cloud consultant bills hourly to set it up.

Three months later:

• Your AWS bill tripled
• Deployments take 2 hours instead of 5 minutes
• Your engineer spends 40% of their time debugging cluster issues
• You still haven't shipped the feature your users actually want

When You Actually Need Kubernetes

You need K8s when:

1. You're running 20+ microservices (not 3)
2. You need multi-cloud orchestration (not "we might someday")
3. You have a dedicated DevOps team (not your CTO doing it on weekends)
4. Your traffic patterns justify the complexity (100K+ daily active users with spiky loads)

What You Should Use Instead

If you're pre-product/market fit:

• Vercel/Netlify for frontend
• Railway/Render for backend
• Managed databases (not self-hosted PostgreSQL on K8s)
• Total cost: $100-500/month

If you're post-PMF but pre-scale:

• AWS ECS/Fargate (Kubernetes-lite)
• CloudRun on GCP
• Fly.io for global edge
• Total cost: $500-2000/month

The Real Cost of K8s

It's not just the infrastructure. It's:

• 20+ hours/month of engineering time maintaining clusters
• 2-3 day onboarding time for new developers
• Delayed feature velocity while debugging networking issues
• Opportunity cost of not working on product

Pro tip: If your current setup can handle 10x your current traffic, optimization is premature. Ship features instead.

The Trigger to Scale Up

Migrate to Kubernetes when:

1. Your managed solution costs more than K8s + engineer time
2. You're CPU/memory constrained and need fine-grained resource allocation
3. You have actual compliance requirements (not theoretical ones)
4. You've hired someone whose full-time job is infrastructure

Until then? Ship product. Kubernetes can wait.

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