Remember UReddit? Its next evolution, Open Compass, has started a Kickstarter

Just to have an area in which to develop, a number of powerful servers, is a pretty large cost, let alone the actual work being done; UReddit runs on a single Linode, this requires at least 4-5 powerful servers. (Note that our fundraising budget is not for ongoing costs such as renting servers, but for setting up a development environment and recruiting some help, on a contractor basis, for the development work.) We did try to be reasonable with the projected costs and even lowball estimates when we could.

I think there's a tendency to underestimate the cost of large scale projects. Even a relatively 'simple' enterprise site can run a few thousand dollars, just to cover a single designer and programmer's wages. Factor in the cost of the hiring process, and the cost of building infrastructure (neither physical servers, nor VPS, nor PaaS are cheap), and it's a very reasonable amount.

The point of his Kickstarter is to convert that fanbase into fungible resources. Not every UReddit user is programmer, and of those, even fewer have free time or the motivation to help out. This way anyone can contribute, even indirectly. Moreover, have you ever worked on a large scale project? Having lots of people involved is horrible. Something like this shouldn't have a team of more than 3-5 people to start. Even GitHub only has 15 people on their entire website team.

Source: I work at a design firm.