I agree that for most people a setup like this would not be cost effective. Our model only works at scale so it made sense to build for scale from the beginning

I agree that for most people a setup like this would not be cost effective. Our model only works at scale so it made sense to build for scale from the beginning. This kind of setup is likely cost prohibitive for most without some funding behind them. The drawback as I mentioned is that the patterns we found necessary are hard to retrofit onto an existing application... therein lies the rub.