Modal free tier includes Serverless platform for running CPU and GPU workloads… Verified September 2026. Compare with 8 alternatives in AI / ML.
Why caution: effective 2026-10-01 — Since October 1, 2026, Modal charges for network egress: the Starter plan includes 1 TiB a month, Team 10 TiB and Enterprise 100 TiB, and egress beyond that costs $0.04 per GiB. Source ↗ Full history ↓
A verdict here is not a fixed property of the vendor. A one-off pricing event demotes a vendor while its recorded date falls in the last 180 days and then lapses on its own, with nothing about the vendor having changed; a standing condition — a free tier withdrawn and not restored, a product retired — does not lapse with time. This one rests on a record effective 2026-10-01, so it lapses on 2027-03-31 unless we record something new first.
Subtypes in AI / ML: gpu_compute — sells accelerator time for code you write; the unit billed is machine time, not a model call; agent_sandbox — isolated execution environments provisioned programmatically for code an agent writes. We read that on 2026-09-01 from https://modal.com/pricing, where it says: “Modal Sandbox + Notebooks Pricing” How we use this.
Modal's free tier offers Serverless platform for running CPU and GPU workloads… We rate it caution — one recorded limit reduction, on 2026-10-01. Best for ai / ml workloads — 8 alternatives available.
Serverless platform for running CPU and GPU workloads. The Starter plan has no monthly fee and includes $30 of compute per month (GPU, CPU and memory), 3 workspace seats, 100 containers and 10 GPU concurrency. Usage beyond the $30 is billed per second: T4 $0.000164 per second; H100 $0.001097 per second. Since 2026-09-01, Shared Endpoints are billed per token from the first request and are not covered by the $30. Since 2026-10-01, network egress beyond 1 TiB a month is billed at $0.04 per GiB. Team is $250 per month with $100 of compute included.
We read that on 2026-10-16 from https://modal.com/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names Modal as "modal" and states "$ 0.001097" and "$ 0.000164" and "$ 0.04" and "$30".
$0 + compute / month $30 / month free credits 3 workspace seats included 100 containers + 10 GPU concurrency Scheduled and Web Functions (limited) Real-time metrics and logs Region selection 1 TiB / month free network egress
How Modal compares against every one of the 8 we list, not against a selection of them. A surface with room for every member of a tied set may rotate their order. A surface with room for only some of them names none of them, because which ones it named would be the claim, and a claim seeded on the date is not the one we serve tomorrow. How we decide this.
| Service | Free Tier | Stability |
|---|---|---|
| Modal | Free | caution |
| Kaggle | Free | stable |
| paperspace | Free | stable |
| Google Colab | Free | stable |
| Novita Sandbox | Free Credits | stable |
| Blaxel | Free Credits | stable |
| Runloop | Free Credits | stable |
| Daytona | Free Credits | stable |
| E2B | Free Credits | stable |
Left out of this list: Hugging Face (shares no subtype with this product), Groq (shares no subtype with this product), Google Gemini API (shares no subtype with this product), Mistral AI (shares no subtype with this product), OpenRouter (shares no subtype with this product), Cloudflare Workers AI (shares no subtype with this product), Cerebras (shares no subtype with this product), Cohere (shares no subtype with this product), OpenAI (shares no subtype with this product), Pinecone (shares no subtype with this product), Qdrant (shares no subtype with this product), Deepgram (shares no subtype with this product), Roboflow (shares no subtype with this product), Scale AI (shares no subtype with this product), AssemblyAI (shares no subtype with this product), Replicate (shares no subtype with this product), Baseten (shares no subtype with this product), Weights & Biases (shares no subtype with this product), Comet ML (shares no subtype with this product), Clarifai (we have not classified this record), Neptune.ai (we have not classified this record), Labelbox (shares no subtype with this product), Composio (shares no subtype with this product), DeepAR (none of this category's subtypes apply), Maxim AI (shares no subtype with this product), OCR.Space (shares no subtype with this product), Parseur (shares no subtype with this product), Reducto (shares no subtype with this product), Tavily AI (shares no subtype with this product), Arize AX (shares no subtype with this product), Audio Enhancer (none of this category's subtypes apply), Braintrust (shares no subtype with this product), Clair (none of this category's subtypes apply), Keywords AI (shares no subtype with this product), Langfuse (shares no subtype with this product), LangSmith (shares no subtype with this product), Langtrace (we have not classified this record), LangWatch (shares no subtype with this product), Lumenfall.ai (shares no subtype with this product), Mediaworkbench.ai (none of this category's subtypes apply), Othor AI (none of this category's subtypes apply), Pollinations.AI (shares no subtype with this product), Portkey (shares no subtype with this product), ReportGPT (none of this category's subtypes apply), Zenable (none of this category's subtypes apply), xAI (shares no subtype with this product), Anthropic API (shares no subtype with this product), GitHub Models (shares no subtype with this product), NVIDIA NIM (shares no subtype with this product), Ollama Cloud (shares no subtype with this product), LLM7.io (shares no subtype with this product), SiliconFlow (shares no subtype with this product), Zhipu AI (shares no subtype with this product), DeepSeek API (shares no subtype with this product), MiniMax (shares no subtype with this product), Exa (shares no subtype with this product), GPU-Bridge (we have not classified this record), Google Vertex AI Agent Engine (we have not classified this record), Google Vector Search 2.0 (shares no subtype with this product), Google Gemini Embedding 2 (shares no subtype with this product), Alibaba Cloud Qwen Code (none of this category's subtypes apply), Together AI (shares no subtype with this product), Fireworks AI (shares no subtype with this product), ElevenLabs (we have not classified this record), Stability AI (we have not classified this record), Mem0 (shares no subtype with this product), Zep (shares no subtype with this product), Letta (we have not classified this record), Supermemory (shares no subtype with this product), Cognee (shares no subtype with this product), Serper (shares no subtype with this product), Linkup (shares no subtype with this product), Parallel (shares no subtype with this product), Jina AI (shares no subtype with this product), You.com (shares no subtype with this product), Hetzner Inference API (shares no subtype with this product). Each is still listed in AI / ML, with the vendor's own words we read that from on its page. How we decide this.
We do not push notifications. Every change we record is readable the moment it lands, and the JSON answer carries an ETag — send it back as If-None-Match and an unchanged answer costs one 304.
curl https://agentdeals.dev/api/changes?vendor=Modal
curl https://agentdeals.dev/pricing-changes/feed.xml?vendor=Modal
Look up Modal programmatically with the AgentDeals MCP server:
{
"tool": "search_deals",
"arguments": {
"query": "Modal",
"limit": 5
}
}