I see the purpose of the cloud being easy scalability, but from a cost perspective I'm not quite sure it's inexpensive enough yet for most startup's. A one off

I see the purpose of the cloud being easy scalability, but from a cost perspective I'm not quite sure it's inexpensive enough yet for most startup's. A one off use for a calculation makes sense for a quick answer to a calculation but for an extended connection it seems like it's cheaper to use dedicated hosting.