I like this question. Well I can talk about my company. I'm the CTO of http://prestofood.it a small delivery food company based on Sicily. We started with fews resources and we made around 3.000 orders per month. We started from one city with a small team 2 developers. Here our initial configuration:

* Heroku 7.00 per month

* Rails app

* Android and iOS app developed with Turbolinks plugin.

Now we are in 3 other cities and we made a cms and backoffice to handle the orders workflow and we developed a printer system with raspberry-pi. Currently we are the biggest company of delivery food in the south of Italy. We have no investors