Scale your science, not your spend. We benchmarked cryo-EM analysis using flexFS against FSx for Lustre and EFS. Results show that Lustre costs 3.5x flexFS and is 21% slower for end-to-end performance. EFS costs at least 1.75x flexFS and is 29% slower for end-to-end performance. We also found that flexFS is faster at each step in the cryo-EM analysis workflow than Lustre or EFS.