[c-nsp] doing HSRP on a 3550 with out it being a ip hog?

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Before I begin let me warn you that I'm semi new to this stuff, especially
any thing other than a flat network so let me know if I'm out in left field.

A few months back I bought a 3550-24-EI and a few 2950-48-EI and planned to
segregate our customers to there own vlan and subnets.  What I have setup
right now in a test network is VTP domain on the 3550, 2950 VTP client, 3550
trunks to the 2950's.  I create each customer there own vlan, and assign
their subnet to it.  I then assign there vlan to there switch port on the
2950's.

I quickly realized that if our main 3550 ever took a dump I would not have a
switch capable to handling our current configuration.  I decided to buy
another 3550 and the plan was to run HSRP.  Now I have the second 3550 but
after talking to some guys in the Cisco channels I was told that I would
have to give each vlan 2 more ips totaling in 5 ips used for each customer
just to begin with (switchA ip, switchB ip, Virtual ip, network, broadcast)
and that doesn't count any usable ips on for there machine(s).  Using that
many ips seams like a waste considering most of our customers only have a
need for a small amount of ips.  I'm looking for suggestions now on if there
is another way for me to have redundancy but also to not have to give a
customer 2 extra ips (with out manually swapping the switch..)

So, is there any other way for me to implement redundancy with this
equipment?  Thanks in Advance!

Shaun