I'm about 5 months of part-time work in to development of a massively multiplayer online game (growhive.io, think Risk meets slither.io). Growth was great for the first 3.5 months. Stalled for month while we made, and then reversed out of, a major back-end change (more about that in a moment). It's now back up again and growing at a great pace.

My main metric, total time spent playing, went from 20 minutes per day in the first weeks, to 1.5 days/day before the big change, and is now up to 3.5 days of play per real-time day. My second metric (H-index on users actions) is also way up.

So great, right?

It would be, except the back-end change I aborted would have swapped in Postgres for Firebase, which at the time was costing $400/month and is now on pace to blow well past $1000 this month. Meanwhile, keeping up with with the website, without even adding new features, is taking a couple hours per day. I have an assistant to help with user emails and some social media promotion, but no one to help on the business or planning side. I'd like to bring in people to help with that, but adding tasks I struggle with (networking and outreach) on top an already full plate of front end dev and back end containment is daunting at best.

I feel stuck in terms of my next move. Try again to transition to Postgres to save cash? Gamble my limited energies on trying to find a co-founder? Ignore the rising costs and grind through my (long) list of bug fixes and features? Sacrifice a lamb in the name of Chris Sacca?