Cost of tech debt vs professional technical spec anyone have a framework for this?
Posted by Soft-Lime-9599@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 10 comments
So I'm in a position I think a lot of people here have seen from the other side. I'm a technical PM (was a dev for \~8 years before moving into product) and I'm now co-founding a startup. We have seed funding, a validated concept, and need to build v1 of our mobile app.
Here's my dilemma. I have two paths in front of me:
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Hire a couple of devs at $25-30/hr offshore and just start building. We have wireframes, we have a PRD, let's go.
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Pay for a proper technical architecture phase first like, really spec out the data model, API contracts, auth flows, state management approach, the whole thing before anyone writes a line of code.
Option 1 is obviously cheaper upfront. Option 2 probably costs $15-20k and a month of time before we even start coding.
But here's the thing I've BEEN the dev who inherited the option 1 codebase. At my last job we spent genuinely $50k+ and 4 months rewriting a mobile app that was 8 months old because the original offshore team made... choices. No API versioning, business logic scattered across the frontend, a database schema that looked like someone designed it one table at a time as features came in. You know the type.
So I keep going back and forth on the cost of tech debt vs professional technical spec work and whether the upfront investment actually pencils out. Like intellectually I know the answer but when you're burning runway it's hard to justify spending money on "documents" when you could be shipping.
What I'm really looking for is does anyone have a framework or methodology for this? I've been calling it "deep speccing" in my head, basically the idea that you go way beyond Figma mockups and actually spec out the technical architecture, edge cases, data flows, error handling patterns, etc. in a document that any competent dev team could pick up and build from.
I actually found a shop called App Makers USA that does something like this they produce a 40-page technical blueprint before any code is written, and you own the document. Which is interesting because most agencies I've talked to either want to jump straight to code or they give you Figma files and call it a "spec." But I haven't pulled the trigger on anything yet.
My specific questions for this sub:
- For those of you who've done consulting or worked at agencies how detailed do your technical specs actually get before development starts? Like are we talking "here's the ERD and API endpoints" or genuinely down to the error handling and caching strategy level?
- Has anyone actually quantified the ROI of doing thorough upfront architecture work vs just iterating? I know it's situational but I'm curious if anyone has real numbers.
- If you were advising a technical-enough founder (I can read code and review PRs but I'm not going to be writing the app myself), would you say the architecture phase is worth it or is it just waterfall thinking dressed up in startup clothes?
I keep going back and forth. Part of me thinks I'm overthinking this and we should just start building with good devs and refactor as needed. The other part of me remembers staring at that spaghetti codebase at my last company and wanting to scream.
Would love to hear how others have navigated this, especially anyone who's been on the founder side.
CalmLake999@reddit
You only need one good dev with design skills. You can switch designs really quick with AI now and making sure state code is detached from the design layers it's easy. I know a guy who can do what you ask. PM me.
pydry@reddit
These are both awful strategies. 1 will create a steaming pile of tech debt and there's a good chance it wont work. 2 is big design up front - it wont work either.
ninetofivedev@reddit
With option B you’ll never get off the ground.
You want to know why vibe coding kind of works? Because getting an idea out there shows someone who matters what is possible.
There is no expectation that it’s a polished product. It’s called a proof of concept for a reason.
Once you’ve someone the idea and get some funding, then you can worry about doing it the right way.
Software development is a slow, laborious process almost by design. If it wasn’t, SaaS wouldn’t exist. We’d all just build out our own services whenever we needed something.
Empanatacion@reddit
This only feels like an engineering question. It's actually a business question and the answer is you commit whatever war crimes are necessary to get your MVP in front of your investors as quickly as possible so you get to the next funding round so that you will still be around to fix your mess.
Twitter was a rails app. Most startups never make it from seed to series A funding.
The framework you're looking for doesn't come into play until you have revenue.
doberdevil@reddit
Exactly. There's a very good reason we've all spent way too much time cleaning up crappy codebases. It's the right business decision.
I'm fighting this battle right now and every day I want to delete half the code. I hate it. But I don't really think anyone is to blame, and if I was in the position to do it, I'd probably do the same.
Upbeat-Employment-62@reddit
The framing of "spec vs just build" is wrong and thats why you keep going back and forth on it. The real question is which decisions are cheap to change later and which ones arent.
Auth model, core data schema, multi-tenancy approach, API versioning-these touch everything. Getting them wrong means surgical rewrites across the entire codebase six months in. Spend real time here before anyone writes a line.
Everything else — state management approach, caching strategy, error handling patterns these are painful but recoverable. You can refactor these without burning the foundation.
The $15-20k spec shop is selling you false confidence. A 40-page document written before development starts will be wrong in ways nobody can predict, because your product understanding will change the moment real users touch it. What you actually want is a 2-3 day whiteboarding session with one genuinely senior dev who has shipped mobile apps before, focused exclusively on the irreversible decisions. That costs maybe $2-3k and gives you 80% of the protection at 15% of the price.
The $25-30/hr offshore team is fine btw but only if you review every PR yourself and catch the "business logic scattered in the frontend" and "one table at a time schema" problems in week 2, not month 8. You have the background to do that. Use it))
Flashy-Whereas-3234@reddit
As a founder coming from a big boy org, you know how it should be done, but you're in a bootstrap environment and things work a bit differently here.
Big boy orgs have deep pockets, but you only have so much runway before your flight crashes and burns.
Youre essentially asking, should I pay $25k additional right now to have a safe and pleasant journey, or should I pay 50k later to get this plane in the air right now. Your answer is however long your runway is.
Personally I don't feel like you need to spend 25k to get architecture, although I do say this as an architect.
Most of my architecture comes from finding a quiet few hours to lock myself in a dark room and scrawl on the walls like ratman until I have a fairly good idea of how it should work, and then I spend a few more hours converting that into something another person might stand a chance of comprehending.
You won't one-shot this, you need to concentrate on simply not fucking up so bad that your life is hell. What really matters in your app? What can't you afford to fuck up? What can you design defensively because you don't know what the answer will be? What don't you care about? What are your lines of isolation?
Put your problems in neat little boxes, boxes in boxes, and don't let analysis' paralysis get the better of you.
BoBoBearDev@reddit
Ask AI about various design patterns and their cost of evolution. Choose one that is cheap upfront and cheap to evolve.
Stuff like authentication, you probably should get on top of it at very beginning. Would be bad people are stealing your client's data.
HedgehogFlimsy6419@reddit
As a startup I would always pick option 1. Option 2 is for big boys with big budgets that can afford a team of SMEs that have excellent understanding of the domain and the problem. Even then, it takes a lot of time. It's just unrealistic to support Option 2 in your case.
Option 1 results in a shit code only if you let it. I genuinely believe in gradual improvement of the codebase, but you have to hire really good devs. At 30 bucks it may be challenging though. I'm what you'd probably consider an offshore dev (EU, Poland) and my rates are 50-60 bucks an hour now.
I've survived projects with MASSIVE requirement swings and the code was just fine.
The only thing I would spend a couple of days on would be to outline the tech stack for major components and then move on straight to development.
Mr_Willkins@reddit
You shouldn't do either, but fortunately rhere's a wide middle ground between those two options. If you need an MVP you don't need a big month long plan, just start with a solid and basic foundation and iterate. Pick common languages and frameworks unless there's a really good reason not to. Use postgres