I think the only reason why he used Sagemaker is that it provided him an easy out of the box set of tools that required minimum-to-no setup. If the author took

I think the only reason why he used Sagemaker is that it provided him an easy out of the box set of tools that required minimum-to-no setup. If the author took the time, he could have stitched together a completely zero-cost alternative that could have run locally on his box, but that would have gone against the argument that this is so easy that "even a monkey can do this". Don't get me wrong...AWS has some very nice libraries, especially their DL and encoding/decoding options. I just think it was a bit heavy using Sagemaker especially for such a trivial use-case...maybe even the free Kaggle notebooks would have been a better alternative?