Honest comparison
ASC vs the alternatives.
A category-level trade-off matrix for teams choosing how to ship serious AI infrastructure. We track the standard hosted-runtime, edge-runtime and PaaS patterns — not specific vendors. Numbers and feature claims are checked against public category docs as of June 2026.
| Feature | ASCus | Hosted A | Hosted B | Edge runtime | PaaS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Runs in your cloud account | Yes — scoped execution role | No — vendor-managed | No | No | No |
| GPU pods (H100 / A10G) | Yes — elastic capacity pool | Yes | No | No | Limited |
| Scale-to-zero, active-CPU billed | Yes | Yes | Functions only | Yes | No (always-on) |
| AI gateway with BYOK | Native — encrypted secrets | DIY | DIY | Generic AI gateway (no BYOK) | DIY |
| Object storage native | Tenant-scoped buckets | Volumes only | Blob Storage | Edge object store | Disks |
| Agent workspaces | Persistent isolated 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, eu-central, ap-southeast | us-east only | Multi-region (no isolation) | Edge — no isolation | us / eu |
| Audit log (admin actions) | Append-only, queryable | Limited | Platform-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.