Two production Node apps — Handovha and Mail Koenig — run on one DigitalOcean droplet at the smallest tier DigitalOcean sells. No Kubernetes, no Terraform, no PaaS.

Sending an email campaign to a few thousand people looks simple until the third recipient’s inbox provider rate-limits you mid-send, the fourth bounces permanently, and the process doing the sending gets killed by a deploy halfway through.

Functional core, imperative shell usually gets pitched as a full architecture: pure domain functions in one layer, all I/O pushed to the edges, everything wired together through explicit ports.

Memory is not a receipt. A landlord and a tenant agree a flat is fine at handover; six months later they remember it differently. A fleet manager hands over a van with a full tank and no dents; a week later, someone disputes which of those was true.

Someone close to me is a photographer who needed a portfolio site but doesn’t want to touch a terminal, a code editor, or a “deploy” button.