Comment by _jayhack_
5 hours ago
Would love to understand how you compare to other providers like Modal, Daytona, Blaxel, E2B and Vercel. I think most other agent builders will have the same question. Can you provide a feature/performance comparison matrix to make this easier?
I'm working on an article deep diving into the differences between all of us. I think the goal of Freestyle is to be the most powerful and most EC2 like of the bunch.
Daytona runs on Sysbox (https://github.com/nestybox/sysbox) which is VM-like but when you run low level things it has issues.
Modal is the only provider with GPU support.
I haven't played around with Blaxel personally yet.
E2B/Vercel are both great hardware virtualized "sandboxes"
Freestyle VMS are built based on the feedback our users gave us that things they expected to be able to do on existing sandboxes didn't work. A good example here is Freestyle is the only provider of the above (haven't tested blaxel) that gives users access to the boot disk, or the ability to reboot a VM.
And fly.io sprites
Fly.io sprites is the most similar to us of the bunch. They do hardware virtualization as well, have comparable start times and are full Linux. What we call snapshots they call checkpoints.
The big pros of Sprites over us is their advanced networking stack and the Fly.io ecosystem. The big cons are that Sprites are incredibly bare bones — they don't have any templating utilities. I've also heard that Sprites sometimes become unavailable for extended periods of time.
The big pros of Freestyle over Sprites is fork, advanced templating, and IMO a better debugging experience because of our structure.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I'm predominantly a self-hoster, but I think your product makes a lot of sense for a wide variety of users and businesses. I'm excited to try out freestyle!
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sprites have weird lately, i think fly.io is having trouble with capacity in various locations.
is the experience similar? can i just get console to one machine, work for a bit, logout. come back later, continue?
how does i cost work if i log into a machine and do nothing on it? just hold the connection.
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I'd also be interested in a comparison with exe.dev which I'm currently using.
Exe.dev is a individual developer oriented service. Freestyle is more oriented at platforms building the next exe.dev.
Thats why our pricing is usage based and we have a much larger API surface.