For years, SQLite was considered a toy — fine for mobile apps, unthinkable for a real backend. That assumption is aging badly.
What changed
Tools like Litestream and Turso added replication and distributed reads on top of SQLite’s single-file simplicity, closing the gap with traditional client-server databases for a large class of applications.
The actual tradeoff
SQLite genuinely struggles with high write concurrency. If your application is read-heavy — which describes most content sites and internal tools — that limitation rarely matters.
Worth trying
For a side project or a service under moderate load, skipping the database server entirely and shipping a single file is a real simplification, not a compromise.