The great thing about web 2.0 is that it doesnt cost that much to get something up and running. You can get ruby devs for 70-90/hour. They wont necessarily create the app that can scale, but scaling is a feature for later. My first iteration cost about 8K and the total is right around 20K to get to a pretty stable alpha. I have lots of horror stories about contract developers, but they are mostly about how the devs are working on too many projects at once so mine didnt get worked on at all. This didnt cost me money, just time.
