Should my startup start with a monolith or with microservices architecture?

For most startups, a modular monolith is the best starting point. It keeps deployment simple, reduces operational overhead, and makes it easier for a small team to understand the entire system. You can still structure the code into clear modules or domains so that responsibilities are well separated inside the monolith. Microservices introduce network calls, distributed failures, and more things to monitor, which only pay off when scale and team size justify the complexity. When you genuinely outgrow the monolith, you can extract the most critical or independent parts into separate services over time.