[mchusma]

Their pricing for these managed services used to be "no brainer" (something like the cost of compute only, or maybe a <30% upcharge). Managed airflow was similarly very expensive (maybe 3x the cost). Just not worth it. Bummer.

[wpietri]

Yeah, it turns out there's a lot of money to be made from people who don't have a good grasp of the fundamentals. We got a marketing email from Huggingface recently about their ML-models-as-a-service offering: https://huggingface.co/pricing

One of my colleagues asked if it might be better than creating our own infrastructure for that. I ran the numbers for one of our recent jobs, feeding a million tweets to two ML models to see which worked better. That would have cost about $1800 on Huggingface. Using AWS spot instances, it was maybe $25 for us to run ourselves.

Of course, we can do it at that price because we are paying for engineers and plan on classifying enormous amounts of text, so it works out for us. Plenty of other people probably should just use Huggingface. But I can't help looking at that 70x markup and think, "Fuck me? No, fuck you!"