Customers should be funding your hardware purchases. If you don't have customers yet then go find some and get enough of them to prepay and agree to use your se

Customers should be funding your hardware purchases. If you don't have customers yet then go find some and get enough of them to prepay and agree to use your service so that you can afford the hardware, etc. Because, if you're not able to build a list of customers that will prepay then this business is in trouble. Better to get yourself into that "sales mode" sooner rather than later. Since the margin for error isn't great ($3k) you definitely want to focus on getting customers first and leasing servers as the other commenter suggested.