Major Price Cuts: Deepnote Versus Cocalc --- Compute Server Pricing

[williamstein]

Major Price Cuts: Deepnote Versus Cocalc

Deepnote is one of CoCalc's direct competitors. Today (November 30, 2023) they announced a major price cut on their pay-as-you-go rates:

"As you may have already heard, starting December 1, we're slashing the pay-as-you-go rates across all our machines – making them more budget-friendly without any hidden terms."

At CoCalc, we recently finally launched pay as you go machines, which was one of our main development priorities for 2023. These are fully integrated with CoCalc, and were a huge amount of work to bring to market. I was terrified that Deepnote's major price cuts would make Deepnote a much better deal than CoCalc.

Here is how the Deepnote and CoCalc pricing compares:

	Deepnote's New Price	CoCalc Standard	CoCalc Spot
64GB RAM, 16vCPU	$1.54	$0.59	$0.12
128GB RAM, 16vCPU (32 CPU on cocalc)	$2.02	$1.17	$0.23
K80 GPU (newer L4 GPU on cocalc)	$2.02	$0.93	$0.30

Conclusion: CoCalc's prices are still highly competitive, even in light of Deepnote's major price cuts.

Also, spot instances do work very well for many applications. For more details and how to get these prices at https://cocalc.com, read the rest of this post.

CAVEAT: comparing RAM and vCPU is not necessarily easy. Maybe I'm completely wrong.

More Details

I don't know exactly what Deepnote means by the above machine specs. However, according to my benchmarks, one of the very best machines we offer via Google Cloud is the AMD EPYC Milan family. Their single core performance is excellent, and a vCPU is equivalent to an entire core, which makes them up to twice as fast as lot of "vCPU" options out there. We offer both spot instances and standard instances.

Performance: 16 vCPU and 64GB RAM

Our best pricing on an AMD EPYC with 64GB RAM and 16 cores is $0.59/hour for standard instances.

By selecting a region in Europe, the cost is only $0.12/hour for a spot instance. Spot instances may stop or not be available, but our stats so far show they often work well for days to weeks, perhaps because Google has built out such massive CPU capacity:

In CoCalc the region where the machine is located is transparent, so you can take advantage of the best prices in the world.

High Memory: 16 vCPU and 32GB RAM

Our analogue of "High memory" above is a t2d-standard-32 with 32 cores, 128B of RAM, and it costs $1.17/hour for a standard instance, or $0.23/hour for a spot instance.

Again, the best price on spot instances is in a different region than for standard:

GPU

Deep note offers a K80 GPU for $1.80/hour. We do not offer K80's on CoCalc since they are so old, but we have L4's that have the same 24GB of RAM and are a much newer architecture. Our GPU price is $0.93/hour for standard instances, and $0.30/hour for spot instances:

Conclusion: CoCalc's new prices are still competitive. Yeah.

Happy Holidays! 🎄