Could you discuss how you are different than other (often free) offerings?
- https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/github-integration-rev...
- rolling your own using AWS SDK + spot instances + slack chatbot (our solution)
https://render.com/ These folks are a production solution and have added support for review apps. All that happens is a new deploy of the production app on every PR. There's no support for spinning up arbitrary commits, caching, etc.. Further, its not free.
https://vercel.com/, https://www.netlify.com/ Only supports frontend (and maybe serverless?)
https://www.releaseapp.io/, https://getdockup.com/ These are both more direct competitors. Dockup is no longer around I believe. Wrt/ release we have different outlooks on pricing, as they charge a large initial fee. The product itself is similar, however.
And lastly, Heroku was discussed in threads below, but the general idea is that if you're already on Heroku, using review apps makes a lot of sense! With that being said, they don't support the features I mentioned above such as, restarting runs, comparing commits, caching, etc..
Let me know your thoughts, happy to keep the conversation going!
* Render PR previews have built-in caching.
* Many of our customers use Preview Environments (currently in early access). For every PR, Render automatically spins up a complete testing environment including static sites, servers and databases that can be seeded with a hook. It's similar to Heroku's Review Apps, but a fraction of the cost.
* Render's Preview Environments are free for static sites and prorated by the second for servers and databases. Regarding pricing: we charge for actual usage (vs. a per-seat model) because previews (and consequently our own costs) rarely scale linearly with developer count.
More generally, it's great to see more activity in the space because it's a validation of our own product strategy, and there is obviously room for multiple players.
Both products operate in the same space, and are attempting to solve similar problems, but as far as I can recall Release attempts to manage all environments from dev -> production, while Reploy is specifically targeting the developer experience around managing and sharing staging environments.
The concept of dynamic staging environments is not new; I've personally built in-house solutions to solve this problem years ago, well before Release went through YC. It's not really fair to say that anyone who comes out with a similar product is "copying Release".
But, we started with the idea of Review apps for more complicated apps than heroku can do.
There are many companies trying to solve this problem in various ways, or smaller parts of it, which is good, validated the space.
I agree with the other responses; everyone is working on the same problem, but from what I've seen no one is just a copy of someone else's work.