[phphphphp]

I have no special insight into Netlify, so this is (educated) speculation: there's an important difference between pay-as-you-go compute providers, like AWS, and Netlify: Netlify is a platform, their value is not derived from the workloads they process, so charging (or not charging) based on compute doesn't align with their value proposition. The value of Netlify is that it's an end to end platform, taking a business from having some code to having a live website, where compute is just one component of the entire value proposition.

The marginal cost of a request is probably negligible, hence the tens of millions of requests included, but there is a cost associated with each user making use of their platform because it includes a lot more than just compute, and that's the value they're charging for.

I think if you're looking for a compute provider that offers pay as you go billing in order to minimise your costs, then Netlify probably isn't the platform for you, and you'd be better off using their service provider directly (in this case, Deno, but many Netlify alternatives use Lambda, Cloudflare Workers etc.).