And yet I'm pessimistic it'll get that funding. I just don't know if it's possible to make money writing software like this.
I'm also rather pessimistic about "making money" like this.
You'd have to sell a service for that to make any kind of sense. Target a minimum of, say, 10$ user/year, or user/month (yes, those are two wildly different prices, and two somewhat different level of "perceived value" you'd need to provide).
Micropayments only make sense at massive scale - and you won't have that starting out. If you cant build up to 10.000 users paying 10/year, you could probably sustain a developer. Just make sure that doesn't generate work for 30 support staff. But "breaking even" (we won't have to stop because we're burning money on hosting) is different from "making money".
It's probably a good idea to one, or the other. Not something in the middle.
Major caveat: I've only thought about pricing models, never found the opportunity to try them out in practice.
https://blog.pushbullet.com/2015/11/17/introducing-pushbulle...
https://www.reddit.com/r/PushBullet/comments/3t5ogz/introduc...