Local-first SaaS is trending, but the sync headaches are a trap

Everyone is hyping up local-first architecture because of Linear’s speed and the flack Notion is getting for its half-baked offline mode. Keeping data on the client sounds amazing for UX, but the engineering trade-offs are brutal. Unless your users are literally working in tunnels or you have strict privacy requirements, local-first feels like a massive over-engineering trap. Managing CRDTs, conflict resolution, and running database schema migrations across thousands of fragmented user devices is an absolute nightmare. Notion's struggles proved that trying to bolt offline support onto a legacy cloud-first DB just doesn't work well. I wrote a deeper breakdown on the strategic trade-offs and what the sync problem actually costs to solve here: https://buildmvpfast.com/blog/local-first-saas-offline-first-vs-cloud-first For most apps, a boring Postgres stack lets you ship fast and validate the product. You can worry about complex sync layers later. For anyone who has shipped a production local-first app, was the snappy UI worth the infrastructure headache? I'd love to get some feedback and hear your war stories on this. submitted by /u/Timely-Ad-2615 [link] [留言]