Modal Starter (monthly free compute allowance)

All new accounts are automatically placed on the Starter plan, granting $30 in free compute credits per month, offset against GPU/CPU usage and reset each month

The official pricing page (modal.com/pricing) confirms the Starter plan's '$30/month free credits' is a recurring monthly quota, not a one-time grant. Converted at official GPU rates, that's roughly 50 hours of T4, 15 hours of L40S, 12 hours of A100-class, 3 hours of H100, or 5 hours of B200. If the quota runs out and no payment method is linked, jobs simply stop with no resulting debt — you must actively add a billing method to continue beyond the quota (the vendor emphasizes there's no risk of 'surprise bills'). Also includes 3 workspace seats, 100 concurrent containers, and 10 concurrent GPUs. The official page doesn't clearly state whether a credit card is required to register.

⚠️Modal is a general-purpose serverless GPU/CPU compute platform — users write deployment code with Python decorators to run their own inference/training jobs, rather than 'calling a ready-made model API.' Best suited to developers with engineering skills. $30/month of per-second-billed credit is generous and reliable for a free tier of this kind, enough to support real prototype development on personal projects.