Not costly, don't put fear on anyone. Cloud Architect Expert here. My estimate puts it at about $90 - $120 per month if you wanna have 2 app servers that can act as load balancers + 1 DB server. Put both behind Cloudflare which will handle Caching, etc. You need an 8-core CPU with 24GB RAM each which is about $30/month on Contabo. For a 3rd server, you can host your DB (Postgres/Redis) at another $30 per month. If you don't want to go that route, get a Ryzen dedicated VPS with 12 cores for $120/month, it will handle this seamlessly, but it isn't as 'efficient' as the architecturally optimized 3-VPS route, which guarantees redundancy. It's not that costly. It's when you begin to have millions of concurrent users that you have a challenge with server costs. Meanwhile, if no one wants to say it: if money was the sole reason for accepting that funding from GB and co, then it was a wrong move. They had enough runway to manage server and associated operational costs. Now, they are a bit handicapped in terms of product direction, going forward.