I have no insights into the per-user cost for Meta to run their platform, but I have a hard time imagining that's what this is based on. I think it's much more likely that users are paying a price based on "what Meta could be making if they sold their data".
It's interesting that there is so much variability in "Tesla vehicles not using Autopilot technology". I wonder if this is just the small sample size compared to the national data, or some other effect?
Very nice! I also took a bitwise approach and ended up with something that solved all possible puzzles in 5 seconds (in 60 lines of matlab).
A technique I used that helped bring the time down was to calculate the points for a given puzzle irregardless of the center letter. This provides an upper bound for the points that could come from that puzzle. After you've done that for all the boards, you sort by upper bound and then start calculating the actual scores for the different center letter options. Doing this for the 538 puzzle, I only had to look at center letters for the top 2 puzzles 'aeginrt' and 'adeinrt' (after those you find a score that is greater than the upper bound for any of the other puzzles).