[akoboldfrying]

> But right now, this wouldn't even be interesting to me to use even if they actually were fronting commercial solvers, because they can't actually run it any faster

So you use NEOS, but another service offering the same thing as NEOS would not be useful?

[DannyBee]

Not if i have to pay for it and use a different API?

Remember, NEOS is both free, and pyomo already supports it natively without me changing anything - i can use both neos and local without any issue.

Why would i move to something with a different API that i have to pay for?

[akoboldfrying]

> Not if i have to pay for it and use a different API?

TFA says Quicopt supports Pyomo. The example uses the "free tier", so you're not paying for anything (yet -- though I'm confused by the phrase "one-time entry point").

NEOS has generous limits, but the fact that Gurobi are still in business tells me that NEOS by itself can't satisfy everyone. Were Quicopt to offer access to Gurobi, etc., per your hypothetical, I think this would clearly be valuable.

More strongly I don't think it's crazy to offer "just" publicly available solvers, despite how much weaker they are than commercial ones. If I had to solve a stream of optimisation problems that were individually pretty easy but the rate of arrival was unpredictable, using such an "Optimisation as a Service" would make sense in much the same way that it makes more sense to serve spiky web traffic by spinning up cloud VMs on demand than by buying a bunch of on-prem boxes, even though those cloud VMs might be very weak.

[DannyBee]

Sure. If it supported commercial solvers for me it would definitely be more valuable. I do think it’s fairly crazy to pay for remote solving using public solvers - the case you give is uncommon enough that whoever has it would probably want their own infrastructure to deal with it. Beyond that the current setup of trying to sell a single call solver as your advantage when the customers who might buy it for real need flexibility of various sorts doesn’t make sense to me.

FWIW-By supports pyomo they mean I can install their python package and hand a pyomo model to their solver API. I don’t want that. I want to use pyomo’s solver API which is how I interact with all other solvers

In the end I just don’t see who they are selling to. If their advantage is a single call solver for different model kinds, which is what they spend the most time talking about, that could be done with a small python package, and would already exist if it was a big issue