Does anyone have experience getting funding for a project?

I recently released an app called High/Low, and our user base, though small, has grown enough that network egress costs (mostly for images) are starting to come up. I want to focus on growing my app without having to worry about the fact that more users = greater cost of running.

I've thought about monetizing the app, but here are the issues I have with that:

• Making it a paid app will make less users want to get it and increase onboarding friction
• Ads are not an option right now
• I've thought about making a premium subscription, but I don't have an easy way to split the features between the free and premium versions. Also, I don't want to take away features from my current users.

Sandeep Panda, I imagine you've had to deal with similar problems with Hashnode - how did you get funding initially?