I mean, the first 1 million Lambda invocations and 400,000 GB-seconds of compute are free each month... you can do a lot of things within the free tier alone. That free allocation represents about $7 worth of Lambda resources. Assuming that it cost the same to write your application to run in Lambda as it would to write it as standalone, which it almost certainly doesn't due to (probably) immature frameworks, that would be really nice for certain businesses. I agree that it is a niche, and savings of a few dollars a month aren't generally valuable to viable businesses.

What I was getting at is that the "scale to zero" feature with Knative is rather worthless if you spend more money just running the Kubernetes master on EKS alone than you would spend running a $5 or $10 per month DigitalOcean instance.

Lambda scales all the way to zero, and it's free when it's at zero. You just pay for what you use. Actually, you pay for what you use minus $7, since every account always gets the free tier for Lambda.