A normal start-up with under $5 million in annual revenue wouldn't make it beyond the Series B phase...

A normal start-up with only $5 million in annual revenue would be getting calls from its angel investors pulling their money back out. I think people lose sight of basic math and are overly impressed by "large numbers." $5 million is NOT a large number when talking about a business with dozens of employees and 24x7x365 operations expenses.

Here's what $5 million dollars will buy in the realm of internet busineses:

* 8,612 servers spinning in Amazon Web Services for 1 year
* about 833 servers if purchased outright as capital assets (about $6000 per simple server)
* about 27 IT employees averaging $180,000/year in salary + benefits

In reality, you wouldn't spend ALL the money on just the AWS server instance, you would also need to pay for database storage and incoming / outgoing gigabytes of web traffic. And housing the compute in AWS doesn't eliminate the administrative work for your particular applications. You still have to hire your own engineers to update your app, redeploy it, fix stuff when it breaks, etc.

And DJT is now a public company that needs additional staff to perform its reporting and audit functions and those types of lawyers and accountants don't typically volunteer to work for free either.

WTH

AWS: a t4g.large instance costs $0.0672/hour for 4 virtual CPUs and 8 GB RAM
1 month = 24*30 hours = 720 hours ===> 720 hours x $0.0672 = $48/month/server ==> $580/year/server