[SomeStupidPoint]

Even with the fixed pricing data... it's still ~$360 a month, right?

So that's about 3x as much to not manage the VMs yourself in a cluster. For even a moderate cluster, that seems like it would rapidly stop making sense.

[sz4kerto]

Depends. If it's a short job, then setting up a new VM for it or even planning where it should run might take a few engineer hours. And engineer hours are really expensive.