I have to concur with this. Starting with a 'team of 3' and building a fairly fancy system with a lot of open-source 3rd party solutions ... making all kinds o

I have to concur with this. Starting with a 'team of 3' and building a fairly fancy system with a lot of open-source 3rd party solutions ... making all kinds of assumptions about cost, scale etc. - this is worrying. In finance and banking, I think that 'simplicity' 'reliability' etc. are the key issues, and it probably should feel boring. I can't imagine that the 'cost of servers' is going to be the key issue, especially since these things are pretty cheap these days. When you look at how much a startup invests in various things ... I'm not sure that server cost is an issue for anything but entities like Netflix etc. wherein you have serious scale. Messaging startups like Kik have 200M users and I don't think they are that fancy, granted, it's not messaging.