...and there goes the whole German market out of the window.

Somebody please explain to me what could possibly be there that would require actual "heavy lifting"? From skimming the features, nothing there seems to require much in terms of computation and data.

It's also a general question - a lot of the new ML-ish startups seem to do trivial calculations that should be totally doable locally, but for some reason they do them on my butt. Is it because (cynical view) butt-first is the easiest way to monetize users further (e.g. through data) and lock them in, or (less cynical view) it's just like with the big data - people drink the Kool-Aid and think they need a Hadoop cluster to do what could be done equally fast with a shell script?