Modal free tier includes Serverless platform for running CPU and GPU workloads… Verified September 2026. Compare with 13 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180 days and then lapses on its own, with nothing about the vendor having changed; a standing condition — a free tier withdrawn and not restored, a product retired — does not lapse with time.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; model_hosting — you supply or select a model and the platform serves it behind an endpoint on hardware you choose. We read that on 2026-10-31 from https://modal.com/pricing, where it says: “Serve LLMs, image, video, and audio models, from real-time to batch” 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 — 13 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 $100 of compute included.
We read that on 2026-11-08 from https://modal.com/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names Modal as "modal" and states "$ 0.001097" and "$ 0.000164" and "$ 0.04" and "$30".
Starter Popular Built for small teams and independent developers looking to level up. $0 + compute / month $30 / month free credits 3 workspace seats included 100 containers + 10 GPU concurrency
How Modal compares against every one of the 13 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 |
| Roboflow | Free Computer vision platform for labeling, training and deploying models. On September 18, 2026 Roboflow announced a free tier for its Core plan: 10 credits that refresh every month, private projects and models, and model weight download. |
caution |
| paperspace | Free ML platform (Gradient Notebooks, Workflows and Deployments) from Paperspace, now part of DigitalOcean. The Free plan is $0 with public projects, 5 GB of storage and free machines for Notebooks in your private workspace (Free CPU C4 and Free GPU M4000; free machines shut down after at most 6 hours). |
stable |
| Kaggle | Free Google's data science platform with free notebooks, datasets and competitions. Notebooks get a weekly GPU quota of 30 hours, sometimes more depending on demand (one NVIDIA Tesla P100 or two Tesla T4s), and a TPU v3-8 for up to 20 hours per week. |
stable |
| Hugging Face | Free ML model hub. Since 2026-10-07, free accounts get no included Inference Providers credits: free users buy credits or upgrade to PRO to call Inference Providers, which serves 200+ models. |
caution |
| Google Colab | Free Hosted Jupyter notebooks with free access to GPUs and TPUs. In the free version, notebooks run for at most 12 hours, depending on availability and usage, and idle runtimes time out. |
stable |
| Blaxel | Free Credits Sandboxes and runtime for AI agents, priced on usage with no plan fee. New accounts get up to $200 in free credits; Blaxel does not say whether they renew, and its terms say unused service credits expire one year after they are issued unless otherwise specified. |
stable |
| Daytona | Free Credits Sandboxes for running AI-generated code, priced pay as you go. New accounts get $200 in free compute on a free trial that needs no credit card; Daytona does not say whether the credit expires or renews, and it does not cover GPU sandboxes. |
stable |
| E2B | Free Credits Cloud sandboxes for AI agents: isolated Linux machines that run generated code and shell commands, work with files and reach the internet. The Hobby plan has no monthly fee and a one-time $100 usage credit, with no credit card needed to start. |
stable |
| Replicate | Trial ML model hosting and inference. A new account can run the models in Replicate's Try for Free collection without buying credit, for a limited number of runs that Replicate does not state; after that you add billing and buy credit. |
stable |
| Runloop | Free Credits Devboxes: secure micro-VM environments for building and running AI agents. New accounts get $50 in usage credits with Pro features and no credit card; usage draws the credit down until it is gone, and nothing is charged automatically when it ends. |
stable |
| Fireworks AI | Free Credits Inference platform for open models, with serverless per-token pricing and on-demand GPU deployments billed per GPU second. Fireworks offers $1 in free credits to get started. |
unrated |
| Baseten | Basic (Free Credits) ML model deployment platform. New workspaces receive credits for testing and deployment; Baseten does not state the amount. |
unrated |
| Novita Sandbox | Free Credits Sandboxes for AI agents from Novita AI, billed per second for CPU and RAM while a sandbox runs. New users who complete an account setup survey get $100 in promotional credits for Novita Sandbox usage, with no credit card; the credits expire, and Novita does not state after how long. |
stable |
Left out of this list: 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), Brave Search API (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), Scale AI (shares no subtype with this product), AssemblyAI (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), SerpApi (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), 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), Cloudflare AI Search (we have not classified this record), Valyu (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