Cloud hosting allows a startup to scale quickly. This is very important to seize opportunities as they arise without having to wait for physical servers to be shipped into the data center. OTOH, last time I looked at their source code, it didn't seem like they were making a serious effort towards efficient data access patterns. This can get very expensive on a cloud DB service.

Anyways, if monthly costs of a little bit more than $6000 are enough to sink the ship, then the whole thing isn't financially viable. Sooner or later you have to pay people to maintain the whole thing, and that is going to be a lot more expensive.