Microservice architecture is far more expensive than monolith

There's a really interesting discussion to have around this. From an overhead standpoint, totally. I would never recommend such an architecture for a 1 or 2 person team.

But at a certain point there becomes a tradeoff. From a server perspective, services tend to allow you to make more efficient use of your infrastructure (especially with containerization) at scale. Early on, it's definitely more expensive, but as you need more machines it (can) get much cheaper from the infrastructure standpoint.

Also from a developer standpoint it can become much cheaper with scale due to increased ability to automate and isolate a lot of the cruft (authentication, rate limiting, fault tolerance, etc). Early on it's far more difficult to work with, but in the long term it drops quite a bit.

From an operations standpoint, it's the same picture. Without a lot of automation built, it's far more expensive to run. But as you scale (both more services and more team members) a lot of that tradeoff starts to swing in the other direction.

In short, I totally agree with everything you said (including the "far more expensive" line), just think that there's really interesting discussions to have around it that few have...