Do You Need a Backend to Launch Your First App
You're building your first app and suddenly everyone's asking about your backend. "What's your stack? Are you using microservices? Where are you hosting?" And you're thinking: do I actually need all that just to get something working?
The honest answer is: probably not. At least, not yet.
The backend question trips people up because it feels like infrastructure has to come first. But plenty of apps launch and even find product-market fit with no custom backend at all. The right approach depends on what your app actually needs to do.
What a Backend Does
Before deciding if you need one, let's be clear about what a backend provides.
A backend is a server (or servers) that handles things your app can't or shouldn't do on the client. That includes storing data that persists between sessions and devices, authenticating users and managing accounts, processing payments, running logic that needs to be secure or consistent, and integrating with third-party services that require server-side credentials.
If your app doesn't need most of these things, you might not need a backend. If you need one or two of them, you might be able to outsource those pieces rather than building custom infrastructure.
When Local State Is Enough
Some apps work fine with data that only lives on the device. A personal to-do list. A meditation timer. A single-player game. A note-taking app for yourself. If users don't need to sync data across devices and there's no account system, local storage can take you surprisingly far.
React Native and Expo give you options for this. AsyncStorage handles simple key-value data. SQLite works for anything more complex. Your app can be fully functional without ever talking to a server.
The limitation is obvious: the data lives on one device. If users lose their phone or want to switch devices, the data doesn't follow. For some apps, that's fine. For others, it's a dealbreaker.
When Third-Party APIs Are Enough
A lot of app functionality can be outsourced to APIs you don't have to build or maintain. Need weather data? Use a weather API. Need payments? Stripe has client-side SDKs. Need maps? Google and Apple have you covered.
This is especially useful for apps that are more about presenting external data than managing internal data. A flight tracker doesn't need its own database of flights; it queries an aviation API. A stock portfolio app can pull prices from a financial data provider.
The tradeoff is that you're dependent on third parties. Their pricing changes affect you. Their outages become your outages. If they deprecate an API, you're scrambling. For an early-stage app, this is usually an acceptable risk. Solve the dependency problem later if the app takes off.
Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS)
Here's where things get interesting. Backend-as-a-Service platforms let you get most of what a custom backend provides without actually building one.
Firebase is Google's flagship offering. It gives you a real-time database, authentication, file storage, analytics, and serverless functions. For startups and MVPs, Firebase is often enough to launch and scale to meaningful user numbers.
Supabase has emerged as a popular open-source alternative. It's built on PostgreSQL, which gives you a proper relational database instead of Firebase's document model. As of April 2025, Supabase has over 1.7 million registered developers and more than a million Postgres databases running. They recently raised a $200 million Series D at a $2 billion valuation, which suggests they're not going anywhere.
Other options exist too. Appwrite is self-hostable and gives you full control. PocketBase is a single-executable BaaS that runs on your own server with minimal overhead. AWS Amplify ties into Amazon's cloud ecosystem.
These platforms give you authentication flows, database operations, file storage, and often real-time features with minimal code. For many apps, especially early versions, this is all you need.
The BaaS Tradeoffs
BaaS isn't free, in both senses.
The pricing models can get expensive at scale. Firebase charges based on reads, writes, and function invocations. If usage grows unpredictably, costs can balloon. Supabase has similar usage-based pricing, though self-hosting is an option if you want to control costs.
There's also lock-in. Firebase uses a proprietary document database. If you outgrow it or need relational features, migration is painful. Supabase's PostgreSQL base makes migration easier, but you're still building around their APIs and conventions.
For a first app, these concerns are usually theoretical. You're not at scale. You're trying to validate an idea. If the app works and grows, you'll have the revenue or funding to address backend issues later. If it doesn't work, you haven't wasted months building custom infrastructure.
When You Actually Need a Custom Backend
Some apps genuinely need server-side code you control. If your business logic is complex enough that you can't express it in database rules, you'll need custom endpoints. If you're dealing with sensitive data that requires specific compliance (like healthcare or finance), managed services might not meet your requirements. If you're integrating with legacy systems or internal tools, you'll probably need custom glue code.
Even in these cases, you don't have to build everything from scratch. Serverless functions through Firebase Cloud Functions, Supabase Edge Functions, AWS Lambda, or Vercel can handle specific endpoints without managing full servers. You can start with a BaaS foundation and add custom logic where needed.
The pattern I see work well is starting simple and adding complexity only when you hit real limitations. Don't architect for problems you don't have yet.
A Decision Framework
Here's how to think about it:
Local storage only if your app works entirely offline, data doesn't need to sync across devices, and there's no user account system.
Third-party APIs if your app primarily displays external data and doesn't need to store much user-generated content.
BaaS like Firebase or Supabase if you need user authentication, cloud storage, or a database, but your business logic is simple enough to express in client code and database rules.
Custom backend if you have complex server-side logic, strict compliance requirements, or integration needs that managed services can't handle.
Most first-time app builders overestimate where they fall on this spectrum. They think they need a custom backend when BaaS would be fine. They think they need BaaS when local storage would work.
The Actual Risk
The risk most first apps face isn't scaling problems. It's building something nobody wants. Custom backend infrastructure doesn't help you find product-market fit. Faster iteration does.
If you spend two months building a custom authentication system and another month on database architecture, that's three months you could have spent talking to users and improving your product. And if the product doesn't work out, those three months are wasted.
Start with the simplest approach that could possibly work. Add complexity when real user needs demand it. The goal is to learn as fast as possible whether your app is worth building further.
Nucleate is built around this philosophy. You can prototype React Native apps quickly with AI assistance and connect backends when you need them. Start with local state, add Supabase or Firebase when users need accounts and sync, and keep iterating without getting stuck in infrastructure decisions. The backend can come later. The product comes first.