Microservice Architecture from €4990 — honest about the trade-offs

Let's start with who should not buy this. If you have one team, one codebase, and traffic that fits comfortably on a couple of servers, microservices will cost you money and buy you pain. The same goes for startups still searching for product-market fit: you'll be restructuring services every two weeks while competitors ship features. A modular monolith gets you 80% of the organisational benefits at a fraction of the operational cost.

Microservices earn their keep when you have several teams working at different rhythms and need to release independently. Or when one part of the system takes ten times the load of everything else and you want to scale it separately. Or when different components have genuinely different availability requirements — say, checkout must never go down while the recommendation engine can afford to fail. Regulatory data isolation is another honest trigger: keeping payment data in a separate service with its own access controls is often simpler than trying to prove isolation inside a monolith.

What you're actually buying is release independence and fault isolation. What you're paying with is infrastructure, observability, and the disappearance of simple database transactions. A single user action may now span three services, and "just roll back" becomes a distributed problem. You'll need an API gateway, message queues like Kafka or RabbitMQ, idempotent consumers, and a saga pattern to coordinate business processes across services. You'll also need tracing and structured logs just to answer "what happened" when something fails.

The most common way we work is the strangler fig approach: you don't rewrite the monolith, you extract it piece by piece. We identify a business capability with clear boundaries — billing, notifications, inventory — carve it out behind an API, and route traffic gradually. The monolith keeps running, the new service proves itself in production, and you repeat. This is how most successful migrations actually happen.

Be clear-eyed about the bill. Infrastructure costs typically go from tens of euros a month to several hundred, and that's before you factor in Kubernetes clusters, monitoring stacks, and someone who knows how to run them. Operational requirements grow with every service you add. Design typically takes 3–4 weeks; the first extracted service ships in 6–10 weeks. Our engagements start around €4,990 for a focused scoping and extraction plan, €12,900 for a complete first service with CI/CD and observability, and €29,900 for a multi-service programme.