It's not, which is why it would be nice if they did the actual work (on your hardware).
I would 100% pay $16/hr to run a self-hosted instance, but I won't spend thousands of dollars to (maybe) get it working (my time + the hardware).
https://docs.modular.com/max/models/
I agree with you though, serving up inference is secret sauce for a lot of teams and not everyone publishes how to do it because of the costs involved in doing so. They need an ROI.
It's not, which is why it would be nice if they did the actual work (on your hardware).
I would 100% pay $16/hr to run a self-hosted instance, but I won't spend thousands of dollars to (maybe) get it working (my time + the hardware).