[syllogism]

An extra large EC2 instance is $360-$3311 per month. Maybe I have an imagination failure, but I can't see how cloud costs could be past 10k per month. So, how much could the infrastructure cost, and still be worth the investment?

Maybe I just don't understand the costs.

[sanswork]

First two ideas that spring to mind would be a realtime video encoding service and a CI service. In both cases your users to server ratio would be very low and in the first case your data costs would be very high. So you might be only making profit of $X per server per month even if your revenue is $XXX per server. When you're running your own servers you need a big investment up front but lower operational costs which is where the funding would come in.