DigitalOcean App Platform

We've been happy https://render.com customers for over a year now and on the surface this looks very similar. I'm glad to see another company take a stab at iterating on Heroku while keeping ops burden low.

I'm interested to know - what's the sales pitch for DO over Render? I'm noticing some pricing differences but at first glance it seems they tip Render's direction. I'm also noticing Render is a bit further along (persistent storage, cron jobs, custom domains).

There are various areas where App Platform pricing is in your favor, including the initial getting started pricing for services on both the basic and pro plan, as well as the cost of databases as you scale beyond the cheapest plan on Render. App Platform supports custom domains today, but we do plan to roll out enhanced functionality around domain management very soon. Today we support pre/post-deploy jobs with cron job coming soon, as well as a persistent storage solution. In addition, beyond the $7 price point we support MySQL/Redis/Postgres as opposed to just Postgres. We will also be rolling out App Platform to many more of our DigitalOcean regions very soon and have an exciting roadmap what we can't wait to get built out and released. Thanks so much for checking out the product and providing your feedback.

Can you consider expanding a 3rd data center to somewhere else in the US besides SF and NYC? Like texas, chicago, or virginia?

Does Render run on AWS? Or it's own servers? Having a little trouble figuring out things like that and what regions they're in etc. Looks cool though.

Thanks for mentioning Render, I had not heard of them. I've been evaluating options over the last few months as we may outgrow Dokku hosted on DigitalOcean soon (both of which have been very reliable and a delight to work with). Render looks excellent.

Render runs on multiple VM providers (including GCP and AWS), and soon on bare metal. More info on geographies here: https://render.com/docs/regions

This was a pain point for me when I was first evaluating them too. I had to manually email support for them to inform me they run in GCP US West

EDIT: see sibling comment from anurag. It appears they now list the regions they support in their documentation.

Congrats to DO on this launch. There's also completely free & OSS platforms that provide a similar experience, perhaps a little more Cloud Native (auto-scaling, scale to zero, team features) like OpenFaaS Cloud - https://github.com/openfaas/openfaas-cloud