If your plan is for none of them to /ever/ make money, then this is logical. If your hope is that one of them somehow does make money, you'll probably want your code to be flexible enough to be moved to a platform that won't destroy your profit margin over pay-as-you-go billing. At which point, the investment of effort will have paid for itself.
There's the problems you currently have, then there's the problems you want to have.
> Beyond size and aesthetics, is this possible today – or is this no longer possible?
[Non-serious answer] yes, you just need a lot of AA batteries!
[serious answer] yes. For example the raspberry pi uses a “fully featured” Linux OS and it looks like it could run for a few hours according to this [1] forum discussion.
But probably would need specific hardware to run for a long time, and sacrifices in OS features…
"But what if a person was so thoroughly replaced with robot parts to be just like a computer" is just "if my grandma had wheels, she would be a truck, therefore it's not so easy to say that cars aren't allowed to drive inside the old folks home".
People and software are different things, and it makes total sense that there should be different rules for what they can and cannot do.
An open web that block scraping… is likely “not an open web”