Sure! The basic idea is that when you use the Bubble data API you use the CPU and not a Workflow. I use it a lot for doing calculations or even writing and reading from the database.
I do this by using a Node.js module I have created (which uses Bubble Data API). One recent example of how I used this is for an ecommerce website I am building. I have a list of products which I want to put in a box (which is the item I want to sell in the ecommerce). Every time I put a new product in a box that I am creating I want to know the total cost of the box, total weight and shipping cost. To do that I don’t run crazy workflows, I just make an API call to my Node.Js backend sending the boxID, I read all the data I need about the products, do all the calculations and then I write/update the data in the database. Like this I use only one workflow instead of… well I don’t know how many I would need to do all that, but they are a lot. If you have a decent amount of users creating boxes the app will become pretty expensive quite soon if you would implement all that logic using workflows.