for the level of computation actually occurring I would agree with you, but for the pricing I don't agree with you.

smart contracts are read for free and are read just as much as any api or application, whereas reading from my API that's doing nothing would still start charging me, the developer, and not be as cheap and using bare metal I have hosted somewhere or locally would have high maintenance or performance problems just reading and sending responses at the level necessary

writing is paid for by the consumers, but again here I agree that this level of activity would fit in the free tiers of cloud services