Honest comparison
ASC vs the alternatives.
We use these products too. Here's the trade-off matrix when you're building something serious on AI infrastructure. Numbers and feature claims are checked against vendor docs as of May 2026.
| Feature | ASCus | Modal | Vercel | Cloudflare Workers | Render |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Runs in your AWS account | Yes — full IAM passthrough | No — Modal-managed | No | No | No |
| GPU pods (H100 / A10G) | Yes — bring your quota | Yes | No | No | Limited |
| Scale-to-zero, active-CPU billed | Yes | Yes | Functions only | Yes | No (always-on) |
| AI gateway with BYOK | Native — Secrets Manager | DIY | DIY | AI Gateway (no BYOK) | DIY |
| Object storage native | S3 in your bucket | Volumes only | Blob Storage | R2 | Disks |
| Agent workspaces | Persistent Fargate sandboxes | Sandboxes | No | Containers | Background workers |
| MCP server included | Yes — every tool exposed | No | No | No | No |
| Cost transparency | Transparent pass-through | Opaque markup | Opaque + bandwidth surprises | Opaque markup | Per-instance flat |
| Sovereignty (EU, AU regions) | us-east-1, eu-central-1, ap-southeast-2 | us-east-1 only | Multi-region (no isolation) | Edge — no isolation | us / eu |
| Audit log (admin actions) | Append-only, queryable | Limited | Vercel-only | Limited | Limited |
| Open-source SDK + OpenAPI | Python + TS, OpenAPI spec | Python | TS | TS | TS |
Comparisons reflect public docs. Vendors evolve. Open a PR or email hello@aiarco.com if anything is stale.