Honestly, I'd see it the other way around. Small companies without a DS team might be drawn to this. I don't see how any company with a lick of sense would lock down their prediction model into AWS. They very clearly won't let you export your model once the training is done.
This would be really nice to use at my startup, but its cost prohibitive even on a very large budget.
I am setting up Spark Streaming to handle model creation and updates for recommendations based on what a user interacts with. If I were to even attempt something similar with this AWS service, its $10 for every 1 million predictions which isn't sustainable (not including the costs to create and update the model).
> but the audience is really limited beyond that in my opinion.
Definitely, largely as a result of cost. I would love to not have to worry about Spark in my infrastructure (its another piece...) but at this price the AWS service is just too expensive.