I co-founded startup 6 months ago, since day 1 we use micro-services. For us the biggest benefit was that at the begin we could hire people knowing different programming languages (we managed to build a team of 5 in 3-4 weeks) and they could build a small parts of the system communicating via http/RabbitMQ. Downside is that we had to have a CI&CD from day one and it costs us some resources.
I am not saying microservices are cure for everything and of course there is a place for well maintained monoliths but I find that even for smaller teams micro-services can be just easier than monolith.
I am not saying microservices are cure for everything and of course there is a place for well maintained monoliths but I find that even for smaller teams micro-services can be just easier than monolith.