> lovable’s already chosen modal over e2b for their sandboxes, which modal offers at a 500% lower mark up than e2b.
I'm curious what pricing info you're using? e2b's advertised pricing for 2 vCPUs is $0.000028/s [1] which is about 30% cheaper than Modal's $0.00003942/s [2].
Claude analysis i did a while ago, [wow shit I think Claude fucked it up]
Modal vs E2b Direct Comparison
CPU Sandbox Pricing
E2b: $0.243/hour (2 vCPU sandbox)
Modal: $0.192/hour (1 physical core = 2 vCPU)
AWS baseline: $0.021/hour (t3.small, 2 vCPU)
Markups Over AWS
E2b: 11.6x AWS costs (1060% markup)
Modal: 9.2x AWS costs (823% markup)
True Margins (accounting for overhead)
E2b's actual margin:
Their cost: ~$0.028/hour (AWS + security/ops overhead)
Their price: $0.243/hour
Profit margin: 768%
Modal's actual margin:
Their cost: ~$0.025/hour (AWS + minimal overhead)
Their price: $0.192/hour
Profit margin: 668%
Key Differences
AspectE2bModalPrice/hour (2 vCPU)$0.243$0.192Markup vs AWS11.6x9.2xTrue profit margin768%668%FocusSecurity/isolationPerformance/scalePremium27% more expensiveBaseline
Here you go, happy to walk through how to do it yourself next time 😉:
Note: I did finish the devin write up… But chose to self censor it bc I didn't want to piss people off, I'm a paid shill ok integrity isn't my strong suit — hence the lack of content. If I find a way to spin the devin piece positively, I'll put that out there
Source: literally myself
Every single ai coding tool peaked this summer and has been bleeding interest ever since:
Cursor: 🔻60%, peaked aug 3
Claude code: 🔻56%, peaked aug 3
Lovable: 🔻44%, peaked jul 27
Replit: 🔻68%, peaked jul 20
Windsurf: 🔻78%, peaked may (ignoring acquisition drama)
The gold rush is over. The miners are going home. But someone still needs to sell the shovels.
You could read this as the bubble popping. Tourists tried ai coding, got frustrated when it didn't work like the demos, and went back to writing their own for loops. But there's another interpretation: The market is sorting itself into people who actually use these tools daily and people who don't.
Either way, the market doesn't seem like it's going to keep exploding at its prior trajectory, which means we're going to have to find another way other than uber-type growth + free tokens to build sustainable businesses.
So to find those margins, we look to a more traditional source of margins: cloud infra
Tokens drive cloud consumption
Matt Biilmann, the ceo of netlify, recently tweeted that they had hit $8M developers. If you zoom in. And extrapolate the lines — there's a dramatic steepening of the curve around the time when lovable / bolt took off and let their agents deploy on netlify. Bolt even recently released bolt cloud, which is built entirely around netlify.
> lovable’s already chosen modal over e2b for their sandboxes, which modal offers at a 500% lower mark up than e2b.
I'm curious what pricing info you're using? e2b's advertised pricing for 2 vCPUs is $0.000028/s [1] which is about 30% cheaper than Modal's $0.00003942/s [2].
[1]: https://e2b.dev/pricing
[2]: https://modal.com/use-cases/sandboxes
Claude analysis i did a while ago, [wow shit I think Claude fucked it up]
Modal vs E2b Direct Comparison
CPU Sandbox Pricing
E2b: $0.243/hour (2 vCPU sandbox)
Modal: $0.192/hour (1 physical core = 2 vCPU)
AWS baseline: $0.021/hour (t3.small, 2 vCPU)
Markups Over AWS
E2b: 11.6x AWS costs (1060% markup)
Modal: 9.2x AWS costs (823% markup)
True Margins (accounting for overhead)
E2b's actual margin:
Their cost: ~$0.028/hour (AWS + security/ops overhead)
Their price: $0.243/hour
Profit margin: 768%
Modal's actual margin:
Their cost: ~$0.025/hour (AWS + minimal overhead)
Their price: $0.192/hour
Profit margin: 668%
Key Differences
AspectE2bModalPrice/hour (2 vCPU)$0.243$0.192Markup vs AWS11.6x9.2xTrue profit margin768%668%FocusSecurity/isolationPerformance/scalePremium27% more expensiveBaseline
stratechery called and they want their swagger back
publish the devin post you coward (jk, jk)
I love your content but the lack of capitalization makes it 100x harder to read.
upload to claude and tell it to rewrite w capitalizations
Here you go, happy to walk through how to do it yourself next time 😉:
Note: I did finish the devin write up… But chose to self censor it bc I didn't want to piss people off, I'm a paid shill ok integrity isn't my strong suit — hence the lack of content. If I find a way to spin the devin piece positively, I'll put that out there
Source: literally myself
Every single ai coding tool peaked this summer and has been bleeding interest ever since:
Cursor: 🔻60%, peaked aug 3
Claude code: 🔻56%, peaked aug 3
Lovable: 🔻44%, peaked jul 27
Replit: 🔻68%, peaked jul 20
Windsurf: 🔻78%, peaked may (ignoring acquisition drama)
The gold rush is over. The miners are going home. But someone still needs to sell the shovels.
You could read this as the bubble popping. Tourists tried ai coding, got frustrated when it didn't work like the demos, and went back to writing their own for loops. But there's another interpretation: The market is sorting itself into people who actually use these tools daily and people who don't.
Either way, the market doesn't seem like it's going to keep exploding at its prior trajectory, which means we're going to have to find another way other than uber-type growth + free tokens to build sustainable businesses.
So to find those margins, we look to a more traditional source of margins: cloud infra
Tokens drive cloud consumption
Matt Biilmann, the ceo of netlify, recently tweeted that they had hit $8M developers. If you zoom in. And extrapolate the lines — there's a dramatic steepening of the curve around the time when lovable / bolt took off and let their agents deploy on netlify. Bolt even recently released bolt cloud, which is built entirely around netlify.
...
i literally cannot read that w/o my eyes hurting
>their own search instead of exa
They use brave
https://app.vanta.com/anthropic/trust/iz673w96495gyjer8h78n/updates
didn't know that, you sure that's what they offer when they whitelabel pricing? https://claude.com/pricing#api
I think building own search index is not trivial
if you poke at it a bit Claude will reveal the definition of its web_search function which looks like this - note the BraveSearchParams property
https://claude.ai/share/45348349-8cc7-4447-8d79-eae6f218eb53
ofc not trivial, good find! interesting note, i'd be surprised if they don't try to roll that in house in the net year but i could be super wrong here
separately, i wonder if claude code uses that same endpoint to do calls
I think by default yes, unless you bring exa mcp
see https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/claude-code/legal-and-compliance#trust-and-safety
One more possible way to double check is to use same query inside CC and Brave Search website, the result seem same