Speaking strictly of infrastructure costs, stripping away any other value of our marketplace and platform, ignoring an on-premise deployment of our platform that uses your own AWS instances, and given a sustained workload that saturates system resources for the lifetime of your instance(s): yes.

For workloads where you aren't making full use of system resources at all times, then the economy of scale provided by our compute cluster often results in compute-per-second being more cost effective even before considering the costs of managing your own infrastructure. It fits into the "serverless" trend, FWIW.

Each algorithm in our marketplace has a cost calculator that breaks down the price using a per-API-call estimate. If you have a specific workload in mind, feel free to reach out and we'd be happy to further discuss the pricing.

Of course it is more expensive. They need to pay for something like the equivalent of AWS to provide the service. Did you honestly think it would be competitive with raw compute where you have to do all the work yourself? I guess if you had a service that could run on a fraction of an instance, but for raw compute + application have you seen anything as cheap as AWS?