If that works out to same prices as keeping compute at literally your peak requirement level round the clock then something is very wrong somewhere. Maybe that issue is not in-house at blacksmith - perhaps spot pricing is a joke...but something there doesn't check out.

Loads of companies do scaling with much less predictable patterns.

>risk of slowdowns

Yeah you do probably want the scaling to be super conservative...but -80% fluctuation is a comically large gap to not actively scale

>To illustrate

Better view I'd say is: That chart looks like ~4.5 peak. So you're paying for 730 hours of peak capacity and using all of it about 90 hrs.

Given that they wrote a blog about this topic they probably have a good reason for doing it this way. Just doesn't really make sense to me based on given info