I shipped a small side project this year: sweepbase.net , a comparison site for crypto debit and credit cards. 139 cards, no DB, the whole dataset is one CSV file in the repo.

Here are the things I'd actually tell another dev about it.

CSV beats a DB more often than people admit

The whole catalog is data.csv , parsed at boot, validated with Zod. Reads outnumber writes by something like 10,000 to 1, and most "writes" are me fixing a number once a month.

For that load profile, a database is theatre. CSV in a public repo gives me:

One source of truth, version controlled

Diff-able commits when I change a number

No admin UI to build

An auditable timeline anybody can inspect

When somebody asks "why did you change Crypto.com APY", I link the commit. That answer is more reassuring than any dashboard.

Zod earns its rent

Zod's schema does double duty: it validates at boot, and it generates the TypeScript type via z.infer .…