# Modal

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/model-hosting/modal/

Serverless GPU compute metered by the second, sold as a monthly platform fee plus whatever the containers actually burn.

## Who it suits

Bursty, self-deployed inference where the bill should follow the work. Compute meters per second and per CPU core — a physical core is $0.0000131 per core-second with a 0.125-core minimum — and the H100 hour is $3.95, the cheapest of the four here that publishes one.

Consider something else if You want a large GPU named with its memory before committing, or support without an Enterprise contract. The page lists B200 and B300 but states VRAM only for the A100 rows, so the ceiling is unpublished; SOC 2, HIPAA, RBAC and SSO are all Enterprise.

## iScore

68 / 100 (80% interval 58–78), rank 2 of 4 in model-hosting — interval overlaps the next rank, so this is an ordering, not a finding.

inetGeek's own reading, computed from sourced facts against category peers by disclosed rules. Not a provider claim. Intervals are 80%; a provider with few documented facts is pulled toward the category middle rather than scored on what little is known.
Method: https://inetgeek.com/iscore/. Full output with every criterion's basis: https://inetgeek.com/scores.json. Every model-hosting peer ranked: https://inetgeek.com/model-hosting/modal/alternatives/

- Price: 66 (49–83), weight 28%, 5 of 5 criteria scored
- Capacity and limits: 47 (8–86), weight 22%, 0 of 2 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: max_vram, regions
- Capabilities: 75 (69–81), weight 22%, 0 of 3 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: autoscaling, prompt_caching, scale_to_zero
- Trust and compliance: 83 (76–89), weight 17%, 0 of 10 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: customer_managed_keys, dedicated_infrastructure, encryption_at_rest, gdpr_data_residency, hipaa_eligible, iso27001, pci_dss, private_networking, rbac, soc2
- Evidence: 75 (75–75), weight 11%, 4 of 4 criteria scored

## What the documentation says

### Pricing

- Free tier: Yes ([source](https://modal.com/pricing), read 2026-09-17)
- Kind of free offer: Free credit — $30 of compute a month on Starter, recurring rather than one-off ([source](https://modal.com/pricing), read 2026-09-17)
- Entry paid plan: $0 a month on Starter — the plan carries no fee at all, and $30 of monthly compute is included before anything is billed. The first plan with a monthly fee is Team at $250. ([source](https://modal.com/pricing), read 2026-09-17)
- Pricing model: A platform fee plus metered compute, and the fee buys a compute allowance rather than access. Starter is $0 a month and includes $30 of compute; Team is $250 a month and includes $100. Compute is billed per second on top of both. ([source](https://modal.com/pricing), read 2026-09-17)

### GPU

- H100 SXM, per GPU-hour: $3.95 per hour for an Nvidia H100 SXM5, published as $0.001097 per second. Modal's own worked example on the same page prices a fleet at $3.95 per GPU-hour. ([source](https://modal.com/pricing), read 2026-09-17)
- Cheapest GPU, per hour: $0.59 per hour for an Nvidia T4, published as $0.000164 per second — the cheapest GPU on the resource table. ([source](https://modal.com/pricing), read 2026-09-17)
- Billing granularity: Per second, and per CPU core rather than per instance: a physical core is $0.0000131 per core per second with a minimum of 0.125 cores. ([source](https://modal.com/pricing), read 2026-09-17)

### Support

- Support on entry paid plan: A community Slack on the lower plans; private Slack support and embedded ML engineering services are Enterprise. Support is a plan feature here rather than something every tier carries. ([source](https://modal.com/pricing), read 2026-09-17)

### Compliance

- SOC 2: SOC 2 compliance is listed as an Enterprise-plan feature on the pricing page, alongside HIPAA compatibility, audit logs, RBAC and SSO. No report or certificate is linked from the page itself. ([source](https://modal.com/pricing), read 2026-09-17)
- HIPAA: HIPAA compatibility is listed as an Enterprise-plan feature, grouped with SOC 2 and audit logs. The page says compatibility rather than a signed BAA. ([source](https://modal.com/pricing), read 2026-09-17)

## Compared with

- [Modal vs Replicate](https://inetgeek.com/compare/replicate-vs-modal/)
- [Modal vs RunPod](https://inetgeek.com/compare/modal-vs-runpod/)
- [Modal vs Baseten](https://inetgeek.com/compare/modal-vs-baseten/)