It would be nice to know a bit more about what is happening in those 8 minutes... is the app doing actual work like recreating state from a transaction journal,

It would be nice to know a bit more about what is happening in those 8 minutes... is the app doing actual work like recreating state from a transaction journal, or is it just being incredibly cpu wasteful for no real purpose? If the latter, my professional pride would compel me to improve the startup time regardless of whether it would translate directly into dollars. The good news is in situations like that (codebases that are just woefully unoptimized to start with) you can often get drastic speed increases with fairly simple changes, if you are clever enough. A bit of on-demand loading here, some basic loop reordering there, etc and now your 8 minute startup is 1 minute or less. Of course, if the developers were any good with such optimizations the app would never have reached its current state to begin with.