You Don't Need Kubernetes (Probably)

I've seen startups with 3 engineers and 500 users deploy on Kubernetes. The monthly infrastructure bill? $2,400/month. The equivalent on a single $20/month VPS? Same performance. Kubernetes is incredible technology. But it solves problems that most teams don't have. When You DON'T Need Kubernetes Less than 10,000 requests per minute — a $20 VPS handles this easily Less than 5 services — Docker Compose is simpler and free Team smaller than 10 engineers — the operational overhead isn't worth it No auto-scaling requirement — if traffic is predictable, scale manually What to Use Instead For 1-3 services: Single VPS + Docker Compose # docker-compose.yml on a $20 DigitalOcean droplet services : app : build : . ports : [ " 8000:8000" ] restart : always postgres : image : postgres:16 volumes : [ " pgdata:/var/lib/postgresql/data" ] redis : image : redis:7-alpine nginx : image : nginx:alpine ports : [ " 80:80" , " 443:443" ] volumes : pgdata : Total cost: $20/month . Handles 5,000+ req/min. For