According to [1], the g4dn.xlarge (a single nVidia GPU instance) appears to have the lowest on-demand price/hr: $0.526. The Tensorbook starts at $3,499 [2] -- that's approx. 6,652 continuous compute hours (~277 days or ~39 weeks or ~76% of a year). Let's round this up to a full year of productive research. I think local hardware may actually be cheaper in the long run for _moderate_ problems, but please correct me if I'm wrong.
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/g4/
[2] https://lambdalabs.com/deep-learning/laptops/tensorbook/cust...