I regret adding i18n to my startup

Translations are the biggest time sucker there is when building a startup.

It's even worse than adding a dark theme; at least with that, you only have to do it once. With translations, on the other hand, you have to maintain them forever.

When you add i18n to your startup, you now have to deal with:

• cache revalidation
• plurals
• detecting / changing language
• i18n SEO
• keeping your translations up to date
• headache with splitting your translations into multiple files when it eventually becomes enormous

So what should I use?

Nothing. Just make your startup in English.

There are more than 1.5 billion people worldwide that can understand English!

And in most cases, your target audience are younger people or people from Western countries, so the % of speakers goes even higher.

But what about people who don't understand English?

Now all the browsers come with built in translators.

And your users don't even have to do anything to enable it, they're turned on by default!

It's 2025, not 2014. Google Translate works really good!

Don't get bullied by big corps who do i18n to do it too, it's not worth it.

Based on my original tweet.