Developers are increasingly turning to reliable workflows to build applications, which are programs that automatically resume from interruptions, making them ideal for complex tasks like payment processing or user onboarding. Popular platforms such as AWS Step Functions use external orchestration, dividing programs into steps and managing control flow, but this can lead to slow performance and high costs due to queueing delays and communication overhead. In contrast, the DBOS Transact open-source library offers a more efficient solution by directly implementing durable execution within applications using TypeScript, resulting in workflows that are up to 25 times faster and significantly cheaper than AWS Step Functions. DBOS Transact records the output of key steps in a database, allowing for automatic recovery if interrupted, and even outperforms AWS's higher-performance express workflows, which sacrifice reliability for speed. Benchmarks demonstrate that while express workflows are faster than standard ones, DBOS Transact still delivers superior performance, making it a cost-effective alternative for reliable workflow execution.