Ask HN: Do you know any companies that use Django and SQLite in production?
In this technical retrospective (2024), @piyiotisk shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Post-ZIRP & AI (2023–2026)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 5 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 3 comments
We do at ArchiveBox.io. We've had some minor issues with multiple processes trying to do long write transactions at once (SQLite can only handle one writer at a time), but other than that, no regrets.
I planned to support PostgreSQL initially but as time goes on I yearn for it less and less. It's greatly simplified the web stack by not needing an init system to spin up a DB/redis/etc, and it allows people to get started with a simple `pip install archivebox`, which is one of the main selling points of the project.
Tons of them, why? Lots of QNAP apps are written in python, django, and use sqlite.