HOSTING / LESSON 01

Why Use Services?

The benefits of using managed services

Written by Andrew Lee JenkinsPublished Oct 5, 20268 min readFree lesson

Start building an app and you'll notice something real quick. There's a pile of problems EVERY app has to solve. User login. Sending emails. Storing files. Taking payments. Do you honestly want to build all of that from scratch?

Hard pass. And that's where developer services come in.

The "Do Everything Yourself" Trap

Picture yourself opening a restaurant. Would you...

Grow your own vegetables on a farm?
Raise your own cattle for beef?
Make your own plates and silverware?
Generate your own electricity?

Of course not! You'd buy vegetables from farmers, order supplies from distributors, and let the power company handle electricity. That frees you up to focus on what makes your restaurant special, which is the food and the experience.

What Are Developer Services?

Developer services are tools and platforms that handle common features for you. You connect to a service that already solved the problem, and you skip writing thousands of lines of code yourself.

Here are some examples.

Problem	Service Solution
User login and accounts	Authentication services
Storing data	Database services
Sending emails	Email services
Storing files and images	File storage services
Taking payments	Payment services
Understanding user behavior	Analytics services

Why Not Build It Yourself?

Say you want to add user login to your app. If you build it yourself, here's what lands on your plate.

Step 1. Password Storage

You can't just save passwords as plain text. They have to be hashed with a slow, salted algorithm built for passwords. Get this wrong and hackers walk off with everything.

Step 2. Login Forms

You build the signup page, the login page and the password reset page. Then you handle every error gracefully.

Step 3. Email Verification

You send emails to confirm users are real, and you deal with the ones that bounce.

Step 4. Social Login

Want "Login with Google" or "Login with Apple"? That's a whole separate system.

Step 5. Security

You protect against hackers guessing passwords, block sketchy activity, and keep up with new security threats forever.

That could take weeks or months to build properly. Or you plug in an authentication service and have it working in an hour.

The Real Benefits

Save Time

Why burn weeks building something that already exists? Use a service and spend that time on the features that make your app special.

Reduce Bugs

Thousands of apps use these services, so their bugs have already been found and fixed. Your homemade version hasn't been through that kind of beating yet.

Stay Current

Security threats change constantly. Payment regulations update. Email best practices evolve. Services keep up so you don't have to.

Scale Automatically

When your app grows from 100 users to 100,000 users, services handle the extra load. Building that yourself is extremely hard.

The Build vs Buy Decision

Fair warning, services aren't magic. I used to run client work on a rented all-in-one stack, and one weekend it quietly broke a client's forms that I'd spent weeks tuning. I found out on Monday... when dozens of forms were already dead. So pick services you trust, and keep your core stuff close to home.

When a new feature comes up, here's how to decide.

Example

          Need a new feature?
                  |
        Is it your core product?
         /                  \
       Yes                   No
        |                     |
   BUILD IT           Does a service exist?
        |              /            \
        |            Yes             No
        |             |               |
        |      Quick to integrate?    |
        |       /          \         |
        |     Yes          No ------->|
        |      |                      |
        | USE SERVICE            BUILD IT
        |      |                      |
        +------+-------> Focus on what
                        makes you unique

When Should You Build It Yourself?

Sometimes building it yourself does make sense.

Your core product is the feature. If you're building a payment company, you probably need to build payment processing yourself.
Extreme customization. You need something really unusual that no service offers.
Cost at massive scale. Once you have millions of users, building in-house might save money (but that's rare).

For most apps, especially when you're just starting out, services are the right call.

Services We'll Cover in the Next Modules

This lesson kicks off a run of modules, one for each piece of the puzzle. Each module starts by explaining what that piece is, then gives a short chapter to each vendor you're likely to bump into.

Module	What It Does	Vendors
Hosting	Puts your app on the internet	Railway, Vercel
Authentication	User login and accounts	Clerk, Better Auth
Databases	Stores your app's data	Supabase, Convex
Email	Sends emails from your app	Resend, SendGrid, Amazon SES, Postmark
File Storage	Stores files and images	Cloudflare R2
Payments	Takes money from customers	Stripe, Whop
Analytics	Shows what users actually do	PostHog

Most of these have a free tier or a free way to start, so check each one's pricing page before you sign up.

TL;DR

Developer services handle common features so you don't have to build them
Using services saves time and cuts the risk of bugs
Security-critical features (login, payments) are especially good candidates for services
Most services have free tiers to get started
Put your energy into what makes your app unique

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