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Start with PostgreSQL as database and PHP/NodeJS/Java/<popular language> as web server. It doesn’t sound sexy but leaves enough room to grow your app if need arises, and it’s much easier to find people who know the stack. Firebase is a mistake in my eyes because when high bills come in, you are locked in. Either the bills or the migration to another stack will kill you.

I think you're right... We blew through the free tier 50k database reads just on testing, and that's just 3 users!

Speaking as a software engineer working on the devops side of things, it's best to have someone with experience in scalable architectures from the get go, otherwise things might get really complicated really fast if you want to transition an existing project to a more scalable, observable hosting platform.

> I figure if we did get to a thousand or ten thousand users, we could recruit the DevOps talent to pull this off before the bills kill us!

How do you plan on recruiting DevOps talent? Do you have funding to pay them?