The Nexural ecosystem has 7 interconnected systems: trading dashboard, Discord bot, research engine, alert system, newsletter studio, strategy tracker, and automation suite.
It would be natural to assume this is a microservices architecture. It's not. It's a modular monolith — and that was deliberate.
The Decision Framework
I asked three questions:
How many engineers? One (me). Microservices multiply operational overhead. With one engineer, every new service means another deployment pipeline, another monitoring setup, another failure mode to debug at 2am.
Do the modules need independent scaling? Not yet. The trading dashboard and research engine both run on Vercel. They don't have different scaling profiles that would justify separate infrastructure.
Do the modules need different tech stacks? Partially — the Discord bot is Node.js, the alert system is .NET. Those are separate services by necessity. But the web apps are all Next.js/TypeScript and share types, utilities, and database access.
What "Modular Monolith" Means in Practice
The codebase is organized as one repo with clear domain boundaries:
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