Before You Pick a Backend Platform, Ask These Questions

I've been building a backend platform for the past year. And before that, I shipped two products on platforms that eventually made decisions I didn't like. Parse got shut down. Heroku killed its free tier. PlanetScale dropped its free plan with 30 days notice. If you've been around long enough, you have a story like this. The risk isn't hypothetical. Platforms die, pivot, or cut tiers. And when they do, you find out exactly how deep the dependency runs. So here are the questions I wish I'd asked before committing. Where does my data actually live? This is the most important question, and most platforms bury the answer. "Managed database" usually means their servers. Your users' data, business records, and application state are sitting in an infrastructure you don't control. You're trusting their security posture, their compliance certifications, and their word that they won't misuse it. For a side project, that's fine. For anything touching financial records, health data, or EU citizen