Modal

Modal turns a Python function into a remote container. Decorate it, describe the image and the hardware it needs in the same file, and the platform provisions the machine, runs the code and tears it down again — billed by the second, with nothing charged while idle. The same mechanism covers model inference, sandboxes, training runs, notebooks and batch processing.

Plans are a free starter tier with a monthly credit allowance and a small seat limit, a paid team tier with a larger allowance and unlimited seats, and a quoted enterprise tier. Compute is metered per second: CPU by the core, memory by the gibibyte, GPUs by the card.

Worth knowing

Python is the interface, not one option among several. There is no general web-application runtime and no long-lived server — this is a compute platform that happens to serve HTTP, and an ordinary website would be working against the grain of it.

Container and GPU concurrency are capped per plan, so scale is a commercial tier as much as a technical one.