From our production stats, a median screenshots capture is 5.7s. Browser-use bills per minute, not per millisecond like lambda does. As is, it's around 2x more expensive than Lambda for our use-case.
We run a screenshot API (ApiFlash) with Chromium packaged in an AWS Lambda container image instead of Firecracker on EC2. AWS Lambda gives you the isolation and autoscaling for free which is ideal for spiky stateless work like screenshots. I believe we get mostly the same benefits compared to browser-use solution but with a much much simpler architecture. The tradeoff is the AWS lambda cold starts, but in practice sequential AWS Lambda invocations actually reuse a hot function. As a result, with a large enough volume, spikes are smoothed and cold starts are not that frequent.
I think you need to try it if you want to understand how it can be useful. I also tend to write as little code as possible. Since I started using Copilot, I don't write more code nor less code. I write the exact same code I would have written without Copilot, I'm just 25% more productive with it.
Even though Redis might be 16 times faster than PostgreSQL at reading JSON blobs, it doesn't mean that it is using 16 times less CPU doing so.
A while ago I benchmarked Redis vs PostgreSQL and I was initially fooled by the difference in query time. But after a deeper investigation, I realised that, even though each individual PostgreSQL request was slower, the maximum request per second when the CPU is maxed to 100% usage was pretty similar between Redis and PostgreSQL. I was benchmarking a count query with a multi-column partial index, so this might not translate at all for reading json blobs. But I think with those kind of bechmarks, one need to be very careful and shouldn't jump to conlusions that easily.
If the authors concern really is the 10ms difference it makes for each individual request, then the benchmark makes sense. But if the concern is to make the best out his server's hardware, I think his benchmark needs more work. no conclusion can be drawn at this point.