Especially today, single-user stuff, especially in categories of things like health,

especially when you’re writing your own stuff,

that’s when you know from the start that scaling doesn’t matter! =]

Related, and more powerful than my comments in this thread are going to be:

https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/

I don't only mean "scale" in terms of users but also scale in terms of features.

So you have to guarantee that your product will stay low users and low features forever or spend a very high effort to try to partially overcome that block when you change your mind.

And guaranteeing that it will stay low features is much harder than low users I think.

In exchange for that you get a better talent pool for recruiting but does that matter if your product has to stay low scale anyways?

Or you have to distribute your code in such a fashion, and structure your business model in such a way, that “scale” doesn’t require you doing things that have nothing to do with providing the feature set (most SaaS).

I'm currently working on a SaaS at my company and we have a lot of issues because of the SPA, I estimate we spend around 5% at least, maybe 10% of the workforce just on SPA complexity.

It can work for some SaaS but if you stay low employee count, low users and you have a core feature used everywhere in the whole product and nothing else

What’s the stack? Is it being used even sort-of in the right place / way?

Feels like a glaring omission =]

The stack is Rails / React SPA for the frontend.

> Is it being used even sort-of in the right place / way?

It's a SaaS where users are mostly always logged-in, kind of an app so you would think it should work from the outside.

I think these are the full requirements I would put for a good SPA experience:

- low users

- low number of features / or a single main feature reused in different ways

- low number of employees

- it's an app and not a website

- you don't have any users living in remote places / poor internet connection

- users are all using modern browsers and can be asked to switch to another one if needed

And I think in my company we only have one of this list, making it painful.

If anyone wants to show up and talk non-React anything,

at any point,

I’ll be checking back around later!

Until then: just talk smack about React!

None of these things you listed are critiques of single-page apps (SPA).

I don't have a final opinion on the subject, it's just the results I witnessed after a long time in the industry. The ones I've seen with Angular suffered from the same issues.

I'm sure counter examples of well managed SPAs do exist somewhere, it's just that it seems much easier to do the wrong thing compared to a traditional stack. This is why I'd not advise for it unless you have a very good reason.

The good stacks should make the good choices the natural way to do things, again my opinion.