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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

It looks like you need a business angel NOT a VC, they are two completely different things (and from your description above it doesn't look like the distinction is clear).

Find someone that is already fairly wealthy from being in business for themselves and pitch your idea to them, make it a partnership and not an outright investment, that would help to get some interest going.

How much money are you looking for ?

30/40 per day for server costs seems to be outrageously high for any mobile startup, why is it that expensive ?

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Thanks for your reply, Jacques. This was helpful.

We released on GAE and we're also using Amazon SQS. At our peak load, we were getting over 1.5-2k users streaming in during the initial price drop. CPU Time was our biggest drain: we've combined instant messaging with a local and global search option which eats up resources fairly quickly. I was very surprised at GAE server costs given a userbase that is <10k at this point (given the costs I had to put the breaks on growth very quickly).

The VC approach was for seed-stage capital (~100k) - I found a few "programs"/funds targeting early stage companies. Basically, I'm looking for a business angel that could assume a mentorship role and provide some "smart capital" at this point to scale.

How hard would it be to port away from GAE and get your costs under control ? The 'cloud' is a great place to be when you want to scale but it can also be quite expensive.

So far for the projects that I'm involved in I have yet to find a single case where I can make a case for a cloud solution vs hosting the stuff directly. (but there are other reasons than financial ones to use a cloud).

Where are you located ?

Wow, that's rough. I noticed on my brief foray into AppEngine that it is really easy to run up against their CPU limitations (as in, four trivial queries on a single pageload will do it), but it's amazing that you've managed to run up a $1,000/mo bill with them.

Or are you really burning through SQS requests fast enough to make it cost cash money?

Either way, it sounds like you've painted yourself into a corner it will be hard to get out of. AppEngine is probably the most difficult platform imaginable in terms of how hard it is to migrate off of. You'll have a ton of work to do just to get out of BigTable, and then you're left with a Django app.

I guess the best you can do is start charging money, and start developing a new version as quickly as possible to stop the bleeding.

Good luck!

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