Closed-Loop Physics-Based Manipulation Evaluation at a Commodity Price: What 4.4 L4 GPU hours at $3.50 Buys You

Running evaluations of contact-rich robotic manipulation at statistical scale has largely been possible only at well-resourced labs, highlighting the need for affordable and efficient options for broader audiences. We present a reproducible evaluation harness wrapper based on a previous study at 200-rollout scale on serverless commodity GPUs, at a cost of approximately $3.50 USD and 38 minutes of wall-clock per replication (4.4 L4-GPU-hours across eight parallel shards). Using the harness, we report a partially controlled negative result on action chunking with sparse data: three independently trained chunked checkpoints produce zero genuine successes across 780 rollouts, while three single-step checkpoints range from 2.6% to 11.8% success rate. A per-step-replanning control partially isolates chunk prediction, rather than open-loop chunk execution as the mechanism, with the failure localized to the training formulation and multi-step prediction. This work further democratizes physics-based policy development and evaluation through our reusable harness.