As a startup, it's tempting to reach straight for the enterprise tooling. Datadog, Sentry, New Relic — all solid products, all with price tags that add up fast when you're a small team.
We've chosen to do it ourselves for now. Not out of stubbornness, but because we believe you can get 80% of the value with 20% of the complexity.
What we needed to solve
WeUniteBrands runs on three interacting systems: the main platform (where brands manage their webshop), the admin environment (where we work internally), and the fulfillment integration (which pushes orders through to our 3PL). When something goes wrong with an order, the issue could sit in any of the three — or in the handoff between two of them.
As a small team, debugging that is painful. You don't want to burn half a day grepping logs every time. But you also don't want to pay five hundred euros a month for a tool where you use 10% of the features.
What we built
We wrote a lightweight logging layer ourselves. Nothing fancy: structured logs with a few conventions we stick to — every component has its own namespace, every request carries a correlation ID that travels through all three systems, and we can turn per-component logging on or off at will.
That last part is the key. When we're debugging, we crank verbose logging on for one component. When everything's stable, we only log the essentials. Logs stay readable, storage costs stay low.
The whole thing took less than a week to build.
What it gives us
When a brand now reports an order that went sideways, we grab the correlation ID and trace the full flow. We see exactly where it broke. Nine times out of ten, we've pinpointed the problem within twenty minutes.
When something really goes wrong, we have immediate context to act.
When to upgrade
We're not ideological about this. As the team grows, as volume grows, as complexity grows — at some point a tool like Sentry or Datadog delivers more value than it costs. That point isn't here yet.
The rule we hold ourselves to: we upgrade when the pain is bigger than the solution. Not before.
Until then: a few hundred lines of our own code, and a lot of peace of mind.