What benefits have you noticed from coding this in rails instead of PHP? Does it run faster or more efficiently?
For me personally, developing on rails made my life so much easier. There's a gem for everything. Facebook/Twitter/Foursquare can be integrated by just a few lines of codes.
Also in terms of resources like tutorials, rails community is by far the largest I've seen. Railscast.com really helped a lot in this project.
By the way, cool project.
Heroku Postgres Crane: $50 (just in case) SSL Endpoint: $25 1 web dyno, 1 worker dyno: $34.50
I'm still using a free Sendgrid to send emails (200 emails per day) but I'm sure I'll have to pay more sooner or later.
I used to use DV provided by Media Temple and it only costs me $50/month.