I never found Athena expensive. Compared to employment cost it will be miniscule.
And some times, if your query is CPU extensive but the queried data size is not huge you can get a ridiculous value for money, like many CPU-days in 10 minutes for just $5 if your query covers 1TB after partitioning.
Query size limits are also configurable.
Obviously it depends on what data you are working on, but not having to set up and pay for a computational cluster is a huge cost saving.
You can setup a data lake, save data and start doing queries in like 10 minutes with this setup.