I've personally launched and tanked two projects so far. In both occassions it was a matter of my competitor having more money, meaning more dedicated programmers putting in dedicated time.

I have a full time day-job and a family, so I could scrunch in some time whenever I could and successfully launched:

Oracle of Legends

Dotademy

Both were database websites for League of Legends and Dota 2 respectively, it was met with lots of love and kind words and usage. At it's peak I was looking at 25,000 daily users, with thousands voting on couterpicks for the champions/heroes. It was a "success" in my book.

Unfortunately around that time a website called Lolking was picked up by the Zam Gaming network (they own Wowhead, etc) and obviously that now had a team working on it as their job.

A team of devs working full time > a single dev working a couple of hours a week.

I learned a lot, had fun making it, but was sad when I ultimately pulled the plug. Who knows, I may revisit the websites and launch them for an international market. So far none of the big websites has localization and I know the latinamerican crowd is huge, so there's that. :)

All in all I spend 60$ for 4 months of hosting, nothing more.