I guess I'm looking for a simple yes or no in terms of yes, the costs of the public cloud would not preclude such a service from being ( even marginally ) profi

I guess I'm looking for a simple yes or no in terms of yes, the costs of the public cloud would not preclude such a service from being ( even marginally ) profitable. Or no, the public cloud is priced in such a way that a business alike to Google Search could never exist atop it without heavy losses. But I realize the reality may not be so simple. Hopefully I've constrained this enough with assumptions that the question is answerable and clear. And I don't know enough about the economics or infrastructure, or usage, to be able to even begin to calculate this reasonably myself, nor to have a feel for it. My feeling is "it would be close." which could be totally off the mark. I guess my intention from asking this question is to expand my intuition for the "lay of the land" of cloud computing economics in 2017, so that I can better judge the type of and feasibility of businesses based on this model. Finally, I'm not sure if this is the best place to ask and apologize if I've annoyed anyone here by asking such a ( possibly construed as ) bold question. It's not a super important question, it just popped into my head. I checked out reddit but didn't see any cloud forums that were active. And this place is probably better than asking on SE, because the answers, even if a bit irate or confrontational sometimes, are probably more diverse and have a chance of being more informed and in depth, in my experience.