There are a lot of similarities, but here are a few differences:
It's region-less, and runs your inference task on the Cloudflare network, near your end users. Though that's not entirely true yet - we'll be in 100 sites by EOY '23, and nearly everywhere by EOY '24.
It was built to work alongside our new vector database, Vectorize, out of the box.
It's accessible to all developers, regardless of where you deploy (via API), but we wanted to offer a seamless option for developers already building on Cloudflare - Workers, Pages, etc.
It's 100% designed to let you try it out for free, so something else must be going on. Feel free to message me at pwittig at cloudflare dot com, and I'm happy to help debug.
I was a long time Heroku user/lover (~10 years) for both personal and company projects. I've recently moved to Render[1], and so far it's been great. I haven't been using them long enough to put it through it's paces, but I'd certainly say it's worth a look. Other alternatives I've heard good things about are Fly.io[2] and Porter[3].
"Stripe is one of the most successful startups we've funded, and the problem they solved was an urgent one. If anyone could have sat back and waited for users, it was Stripe. But in fact they're famous within YC for aggressive early user acquisition.
..."At YC we use the term "Collison installation" for the technique they invented. More diffident founders ask "Will you try our beta?" and if the answer is yes, they say "Great, we'll send you a link." But the Collison brothers weren't going to wait. When anyone agreed to try Stripe they'd say "Right then, give me your laptop" and set them up on the spot."
Also happy to help if you run into any other issues - pwittig at cloudflare dot com.