Yup. The logistics startup I joined nearly 7 years ago should have done the same. A single VM of say 4 cores and 8 gigs of memory and about 100G of disk would have been plenty for our proposed PoC and it should have run as a monolith. That’s what I would do had I to do it again. Instead what we did was what I call HN driven development: k8s, microservices, cloud. 7 or so months after I joined and on my way out we had nothing to show for it except for a really strong and capable front end dev who was basically faking functionality to appease investors because we the backend folks were so incompetent. (Man I sure have come a long way from those days. I was dumber then. I’m still dumb now — just not as much.)