This mindset is criminally underrated in the startup/indie builder world. There's so much pressure to architect for scale you might never reach, or to use "industry standard" stacks that add enormous complexity.

I've been heads-down building a scheduling tool, and the number of times I've had to talk myself out of over-engineering is embarrassing. "Should I use Kafka for event streaming?" No. "Do I need microservices?" Probably not. "Can Postgres handle this?" Almost certainly yes.

The real skill is knowing when you've actually outgrown something vs. when you're just pattern-matching what Big Tech does. Most products never get to the scale where these distinctions matter—but they DO die from complexity-induced paralysis.

What's been your experience with that inflection point where you actually needed to graduate to more complex tooling? How did you know it was time?