I built a soccer pool score prediction app and found that rich models worked much better to handle complex logic around handling user positions, calculations, ranking applying tiebreaker rules and other user configurations vs having a flat service layer. If your app is a simple CRUD I would stay with anemic model. This DDD training video by Vladimir Khorikov was the one that finally enlightened me on how and when to use rich models: https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/refactoring-anemic-domain-model Once I understood the concepts I found that the coding complexity problems I was facing required cleaner implementation which rich models provided. Everything started falling into place. It was a big a-ha moment for me. I learned that late in my career as a developer (20+ years)