It'd be interesting to compare the scale at which these providers operate and see if the deploy time grew over time as the company grew.
I am wondering if Reflame would be able to achieve the same results if it had even quarter of customer base as Cloudflare or Netlify or Vercel.
The biggest limitation, and apples-to-oranges of this comparison is that it seems to me - from what I gather from the homepage - that Reflow only allows to deploy React. The bigger players listed allow all sorts of frameworks and runtimes to be deployed to their edge. I am guessing that optimizing for a one very specific configuration - React is way easier than to support many different flavors and build systems.
Lastly:
Every service tested here, except Reflame, currently uses the term "instant" to describe their preview deploys:
The post was definitely written as a content marketing piece for Reflame, but I did also write it with the genuine intent to give an apples-to-apples comparison between the current popular deployment services in use by most people today, that could be useful even for someone who's completely disinterested in ever using Reflame (you're totally right that comparing Reflame to the others is apples-to-oranges, and I honestly did try to disemphasize those kinds of comparisons in the discussions). Hopefully that was true for you as well, but I apologize if the self-promotion was too in-your-face. Will try to do better next time.
Re: scale. Reflame is definitely playing on easy mode at the moment since the deployment service is sitting idle most of the time, and ready to process requests at a moment's notice. The real test will be when we have enough traffic to start saturating compute on individual nodes and require more sophisticated routing and scheduling.
That said, Reflame's intrinsic advantage is that individual deploys are fast and efficient enough that it's feasible to pool them onto a small handful of simple multitenant web servers sharing memory/compute without significantly impacting user experience, rather than requiring each deploy to spin up a new VM/container in a gigantic fleet using dedicated compute and over-provisioned memory. So I'm bullish on our longer term scaling prospects here.
Re: instant. I've definitely been making a conscious effort to avoid the term, but looks like I wasn't successful in that very prominent instance. That's embarrasing, appreciate you catching that. That said, I don't think my use of it is necessarily hypocritical since Reflame deploys fast enough to qualify as truly instant in a fairly rigorous definition of the word as seen in the results of the article.
I ended up finding out that Netlify had some rather long queuing times that made it ~10s slower than the duration it reports, putting it well behind Vercel (which reports similar a similar duration), but still ahead of Cloudflare Pages (which suffers due to doing a bunch of things irrelevant to the simple Vite app I was deploying).
Meanwhile, Reflame consistently finishes deploying before I can even finish creating the PR. :)
If this piqued your interest for Reflame, I have a demo on https://reflame.app, and more technical details on my Show HN launch post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33134059). Give it a shot if you're building a client-rendered React web app, and tired of waiting for minute-long deploys that break your flow every time you want to share your work. :)