Just as Joel Krause, one of the founders of Excite, mentioned in a recent article of Business 2.0, it can be pretty cheap now to start an online startup. Open source and LAMP is free, the server hardware is very cheap, and marketing through the web and word of mouth can be a lot cheaper than traditional marketing methods. In the link above, Paul Graham also mentions how programming languages have become much more powerful, so that less people are needed to code – another cost savings.