# Sail Research vs Dolphin

> Both trade latency for price. Sail does it with completion windows on a funded platform; Dolphin does it with idle consumer GPUs.

Canonical: https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/sail-research-vs-dolphin · By The Subconscious Team · Updated October 11, 2026

## How they compare

Sail serves Kimi K2.6, GLM-5.3, GPT-OSS 120B, Qwen 3.6, Gemma 4 and customer LoRA fine-tunes, discounted 30 to 85% depending on how long you can wait. It raised $80M and reports trillions of tokens a week. Dolphin launched its API in October 2026 with one model, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, at $0.01 in and $0.07 out, on consumer GPUs with no published speed, context or SLA, and signup through a crypto wallet and Telegram.

Sail is the more complete option for long-running agents and batch work, with a wider catalog, fine-tunes and sandboxes. Dolphin is very cheap on its one model and hosts uncensored models, but uptime is less predictable and its signup will not clear most procurement teams.

## What each one does

### Sail Research

Sail Research sells throughput over latency. Founders Neil Movva and Samir Menon built a serving stack that packs as much work as possible into every GPU, and customers state how long they can wait through completion windows. Its docs quote each window against traditional providers: the default asap window serves at low latency for 30 to 70% less, balanced for 45 to 80% less, and the off-peak flex window for 55 to 85% less. Batch requests default to flex, and LoRA and custom-tool requests default to balanced.

### Dolphin

Dolphin began in 2023 as Eric Hartford's series of open-source, uncensored fine-tunes, trained to drop the refusals and baked-in guidelines of their base models so that the developer sets the rules through the system prompt. Current releases include Dolphin Llama 3.1 8B and Dolphin Mistral 24B Venice Edition, built with Venice, and the project publishes nearly 100 models on Hugging Face. It also runs a chat app, a Telegram bot and a synthetic data service that generates answers to commonly refused prompts.

## Which is best, and when

### Choose Sail Research for

- Hours-long background agents
- Batch and evals on large open models
- Customer LoRA fine-tunes

### Choose Dolphin for

- Very cheap DeepSeek V4.1 Flash calls
- Models without vendor-imposed refusals
- Small background jobs on one model

## At a glance

| Attribute | Sail Research | Dolphin |
|---|---|---|
| Model access | Open weights | Open weights, uncensored fine-tunes |
| Flagship models | Kimi K2.6, GLM-5.3, GPT-OSS 120B | DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, Dolphin Mistral 24B |
| Speed | Low-latency default; slower windows cheaper | - |
| Price | 30–85% below other hosts by completion window | $0.01 in, $0.07 out (DeepSeek V4.1 Flash) |
| Customization | Customer LoRA fine-tunes | Own uncensored fine-tunes |
| Deployment | API plus Sailboxes | Decentralized serverless API |
| Long context | Varies by model | - |

## FAQ

### What is the difference between Sail Research and Dolphin?

Both trade latency for price. Sail does it with completion windows on a funded platform; Dolphin does it with idle consumer GPUs.

### When should I choose Sail Research over Dolphin?

Hours-long background agents; Batch and evals on large open models; Customer LoRA fine-tunes.

### When should I choose Dolphin over Sail Research?

Very cheap DeepSeek V4.1 Flash calls; Models without vendor-imposed refusals; Small background jobs on one model.

### Is Sail Research or Dolphin cheaper?

Sail Research: 30–85% below other hosts by completion window. Dolphin: $0.01 in, $0.07 out (DeepSeek V4.1 Flash). The cheaper choice depends on the model and workload.

## Running long-horizon agents?

If your agents run past 200K tokens, compare both against Subconscious: [Subconscious vs Sail Research](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/subconscious-vs-sail-research.md), [Subconscious vs Dolphin](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/subconscious-vs-dolphin.md).

Full profiles: [Sail Research](https://www.subconscious.dev/providers/sail-research.md), [Dolphin](https://www.subconscious.dev/providers/dolphin.md).