How does an app like this make money? I made an app that I simply can’t promote because it would bankrupt me. Every person I share it with thinks it’s genius and been using it but if it ever hits critical mass without me knowing it, id be those guys with the “my cloud provider reamed me overnight” posts.

Why does everything have to make money? People like to built things as a hobby. If you stay away from expensive cloud providers and use cheap vServers, you can host a site like that for around 5-20$/month (depending on number of users).

Why do you need a cloud provider? Can't a 5$ VPS do the job?

I use the Flighty app pretty often, and its $60/year.

What’s your app? Where do the costs come from?

pro features and IAP

All my projects are also pure genius and the only reason they are not hyper successful is they'd be too expensive to run too.

The main reason I also am not president of the world already is because I wouldn't like the attention.

Ads? It's not great for users but it's decent monetization. If you really have something good, like actually liked, you can do a donation vs ad-supported model.