Researching the benefits of serverless and objections to it by different organisation types

I’m trying to dig a bit deeper into the value proposition of serverless and the objections to using serverless as things stand today in May 2022 and I would really appreciate some qualitative feedback from you with this.

The angle I want to tackle this is by the organisation type. Different benefits and downsides matter more to different company contexts.

These are the list of organisation types that I’m considering as I think they have meaningfully different business models and operational challenges:

• Bootstrapped or self-funded tech startups
• VC funded tech startups
• Development agencies/software services companies who build apps for multiple clients
• In-house SMB/enterprise software teams building line of business applications
• DevTools companies building products/platforms targeted at engineers (these are a kind of special-case category that I think are worth considering separately)

My questions for you are:

1. Have you experience working with any of the above types of organisation?

2. If so, for each company type you’ve worked in:

   • What do you think are the top 1 or 2 benefits of adopting serverless for this company?
   • What are the main drawbacks to adopting serverless for this company? And in your opinion, do these outweigh the benefits?

Any additional commentary or observations you can provide would be much appreciated. Just hit reply with your answers.

Thanks in advance!

— Paul

P.S. I asked a question on Twitter yesterday which got quite a bit of traction asking why so few funded startups are building with serverless. There’s been a ton of interesting replies and I’m hoping to aggregate them all, identify common patterns and write something up soon with my own thoughts.