Do Startups Need Platform Engineering?

Do startups need platform engineering? I know in your mind you screamed “No,” and rightly so. It's one of those questions we will debate forever, and the “Nays” might always have it.  

Platform engineering is maturing quickly, but every conversation focuses on enterprises with hundreds of developers. Startups that consider platform engineering often struggle to know where to begin, and others dismiss the idea entirely. 

However, the rise of AI and fast-moving markets means startups can scale overnight. And without foresight, early automations collapse when demand from both developers and end users increases. 

The goal of this article is not to tell you that you need platform engineering as a startup, but to help you checkmate if you do, and prepare you for the journey ahead. 

Why do startups dismiss platform engineering?

When you’re fighting for product-market fit, every hour feels like a runway countdown, and anything that doesn’t directly ship features sounds like overhead and rightly so.

For startups that have found product-market fit, there are other reasons why they might dismiss the idea. The major one? Cost and resource constraints.

When users are growing and demanding new features, who has time to think about developer experience, process standardisation, etc? That is luxury. 

Additionally, small teams often assume that “a platform” means hiring more people and adding more processes (things they can’t afford early on). In their minds, “platform” = “overhead.” However, the truth is, a good platform can start small: sometimes as simple as codifying a repeatable workflow that saves hours every week, which leads every growing startup to the DIY stage. 

The DIY stage: accidental platforms

When does a startup stop being a startup? 

When they have 20 engineers? Or hit $3 million in ARR? 

The truth is, there is no exact answer to that. 

However, every growing startup eventually reaches a breaking point with its software delivery.

Only one person knows how to assign new cloud accounts. Deployments take longer. Onboarding a new engineer becomes a week-long tour of bash scripts. 

Suddenly, someone says, “We need to automate this.”

That’s when the DIY platform phase begins. Off to the races with a collection of scripts, pipelines, and dashboards stitched together to make things feel organised. It’s not wrong. In fact, as mentioned earlier, it’s the first step toward platform thinking. But here’s the trap: most teams stop there. They think, “We’ve automated it, so we're good.”

And that’s where façade platforms are born.

The risks of the platform façade

While it's not yet evident, you may be at risk right now. You have pipelines all running, and you’re working towards integrating a portal. That's great, but it's important to note that “Portals + Pipelines doesn’t equal a Complete Platform”. It's a façade platform (a platform that looks solid from the outside but is hollow inside). 

Why do I say hollow?

Well, developer portals, workflow engines, and CI/CD pipelines bring quick wins, but they can also create a fragile illusion of progress. Day 1 is a breath of fresh air. Day 2, 3, 1000 feels like a living nightmare. 

Without orchestration, governance, and lifecycle guarantees, these “façade platforms” begin to duplicate effort, add operational burden, and ultimately decay.

Think about it this way: you know the tools you need, you know what success looks like, but ignore (most times not intentionally) the safest way to get there. That’s just like shooting a bullet, only for it to ricochet (rebound) back to you. 

The “missing middle” in platform engineering

To avoid this trap, startups must evolve from early automation to orchestration.

Yes, I know you’re already groaning. But platform orchestration offers everything a startup needs:

• Speed

• Safety

• Efficiency

• Scalability

Let’s see how platform automation and orchestration compare based on four pillars of needs:

Platform Pillar	Automation  (Portals + Pipelines)	Orchestration  (Platform as a Product)
Speed	Short-term focus: Fast to build and demo; quick paths for initial delivery, but hard to maintain pace with growing maintenance costs.	Balanced focus: Fast creation on Day 1 and safe, repeatable, sustainable delivery on Day 2 and beyond.
Safety	Scattered: Policy checks are inconsistently applied and fragmented across tools/systems.	Shared governance: Enforces policy and compliance where expertise lies, with automated drift detection.  Suppose you're building a product in a regulated industry. You should worry about this from Day 1.
Efficiency	Pipeline-focused: Teams duplicate logic in scripts and pipelines; hard to maintain and evolve.	Collaborative by design: Platform responsibilities are shared, with reusable capabilities managed across a fleet.
Scalability	One-size-fits-all: Hard to standardise services across diverse teams; grows tribal knowledge.  It may not be a concern for a startup at this time. However, it would be a loss if you were to lose talent with tribal knowledge in the near future.	Composable and participatory: Platform capabilities are abstracted into reusable, versioned services that teams can extend and evolve together.

True platforms provide extendable APIs, clearly defined contracts, policy enforcement, and upgrade paths. These are features that don’t come “out of the box” with typical workflows and pipeline tools. They require orchestration, a persistent control layer that understands the full lifecycle of a platform capability.

How startups can start small, plan big

Not all of these platform pillars may be a concern for you now as a startup. In reality, even enterprises don’t set out to build a platform to solve all their engineering problems at once. Those who do often get burned. 

The more intelligent approach across the board is to build intentionally, not instantly. And the first step is to choose the right tool.

Tool choice matters in building a platform

It’s so easy to reach for an out-of-the-box tool. That's logical. We are creatures in search of the least resistance. Buying a “finished” platform seems like a win: you get a ready set of templates, built-in assumptions, and you avoid the grunt work of building from scratch.

But here’s the catch: every startup’s infrastructure, workflows, and compliance requirements are unique. Therefore, you should choose tools like Kratix (an open-source platform framework) and CNOE that enable you to build a composable platform, allowing you to rearrange or replace components as needed.

Developer experience from day one

Building a platform doesn’t mean building every component from scratch. Remember, you're a growing startup, and like most startups, you should embrace managed services, such as Amazon RDS. With a platform framework like Kratix, you can simply provide self-service access to this, while also ensuring that your organisation’s requirements and needs are met through a Promise and associated workflows. 

A Promise is a set of instructions that produce a resource whenever they are invoked. A Promise consists of:

• API description of how a developer can request a Promise.

• Dependencies, which are optional and can be made a requirement, must be met before a developer can request the Promise. 

• Workflows that define how provisioning takes place. 

• Destination rules enable the Promise Author to determine where resources should be allocated. Whether you are deploying on VM or Kubernetes. 

Kratix Promise

The Kratix Marketplace offers many example Promises. The Amazon RDS Promise, for example, enables your developers to continue using their preferred managed provider while providing a solid platform foundation that you can customise at any time. 

The above YAML is the default Kratix Amazon RDS Promise, which you can start with and customise over time as your platform requirements grow. You can find the full Promise on GitHub. 

Adopt a product mindset

Yes, you are a startup with a product. But if you want your platform to succeed as you scale, you should treat it as a product too. That means shifting from a project mindset (“let’s build this tool and check the boxes”) to a product mindset (“who are our users inside the organisation, what do they really need, how will we measure whether this is valuable?”).

At first, this may not make sense, given the time and expertise investment. But if you stop at “we built X pipeline” or “we added Y portal”, you risk building something that “works today” but fails to deliver outcomes tomorrow.

By doing all this, you start small but are ready to scale whenever necessary. 

What enterprises can teach startups

Enterprises often move slowly, but they’ve got one advantage: they've had to build for longevity. Things like lifecycle management, versioning, and governance may not be glamorous, but they keep systems alive when complexity arises. 

Startups can borrow that discipline early, not to slow down, but to make speed sustainable.

At the same time, startups offer what enterprises envy: agility, experimentation, and a culture that prioritizes building. The smartest teams blend both worlds; enterprise maturity without the enterprise drag. 

Borrow just enough process to stay sane, without losing the scrappiness that got you here.

When “too soon” becomes “too late”

There’s a fine line between being early and being unprepared. Build a platform too soon, and it slows you down. Wait too long, and your speed turns into chaos (brittle pipelines, tribal knowledge, and slow onboarding).

The turning point is clear: when maintaining delivery pipelines costs more than building features, it’s no longer “too soon.” It’s already too late.

Start small, plan big, and treat your platform like a product. The goal isn’t to act like an enterprise, it’s to scale without losing your startup edge.