The main question is scale, e.g. for a smaller site/MVP $6k seems to be reasonable.
If it's aiming at tens/hundreds of users a WP plugin or the $100-200 CMS options are usually enough with a smaller tier hosting plan.
From higher user brackets and just in general: you will run into bottlenecks, the site could literally collapse under higher pressure (e.g. a reddit link making hundreds of people jump on the site at the same time), you will run out of disk space, you might lose your whole database due to not backing it up, etc.. not to mention the services you need to handle e.g. DMCA/KYC/GDPR/etc...
You can prepare the project for scale relatively "cheaper", as someone mentioned e.g. with kubernetes (or just with simple containerization, using independent APIs distributed on different machines to avoid cpu/io hogging, etc), you can start the project out with load balancing, db sharding, etc in mind, worst case scenario you won't need to balance horizontally but the option will be there.
You could validate the idea relatively cheaply but to publish it for a wider audience (promoting, buying traffic, etc) I'd at least spend a couple thousand on a developer who'd make it semi-scalable.
For smaller scale to be honest it's a lot easier/cheaper to use an already made service for a monthly fee, obviously for high/competitive scale if you want to fully own it it could be easily in the 6 figures.
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Opinions are my own and not the views of my employer.
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