Monolith vs microservices for a small team — what's the honest answer?

For a two-person team the answer isn't close: monolith. Microservices solve an organizational problem — letting many teams deploy independently without stepping on each other. You don't have many teams. You have two people and zero users. What microservices cost you: network calls where function calls used to be, distributed debugging, deployment orchestration, data consistency gymnastics. That tax is paid in the hours you should spend finding customers. Build a well-structured monolith: clear module boundaries inside one codebase, one database, one deploy. If you're lucky enough to hit the scale where it hurts, you'll extract services along those module seams — with real usage data telling you where. Shopify and Stack Overflow ran (and largely run) majestic monoliths at massive scale.