>Pay per request needs to be within 2x magnitude of an always on server.
Are any of them? Stuff like cloud run is very competitively priced when assuming base case...but by its very nature it can scale up near infinitely. And with it bugs & bills.
The ability to cap things by 2 order of magnitudes would make me sleep much better. (1 would be better).
They don't, they are all crazy priced which means the cloud providers don't really know what they are doing, forcing people to deploy their own FaaS layers inside their cloud infra, which is a totally valid solution.
Currently, FaaS platforms should be viewed like a cron. The majority of the benefit is if the fn is called in the low thousands per day.