Modal free tier: $30 per month

Modal’s Starter plan includes $30 per month of free credits, labeled “Included compute” on the pricing page. The plan itself costs $0 plus whatever compute you use beyond the credits. This is a monthly allowance, not a one-time signup grant. You must have a payment method on file to use Modal at all, per their billing docs. Checked against the official pricing and billing pages on 2026-09-02; the startup program page was checked 2026-08-29.

Screenshot: Modal pricing page

Last checked: 2026-08-20

What the $30 covers

Officially it is “free credits”, “free compute”, or “included compute”. Modal’s pricing page lists GPU, CPU, memory, and storage as separate line items, but does not itemize which of those the $30 applies to. So the honest answer on coverage specifics is: not stated officially. I will not write “$30 of free GPU” because no official page says that. Whether unused credit rolls over to the next month is also not stated officially.

Billing granularity

Modal’s pricing page shows per-second rates. As one example, an Nvidia H100 was listed at $0.001097 per second as of 2026-08-24. Their billing docs say Modal is serverless, you pay only for compute you use or request, and there are “no minimum usage-time increments”. Note the docs phrase it that way rather than using the words “billed per second”, so I mirror both statements separately.

The payment method requirement

The billing docs say: you must have a payment method on file in order to use Modal. The official word is “payment method”, not “credit card”. There is no officially described way to consume the monthly credits without one, which is why this entry is marked as requiring a payment method.

The Team plan, for completeness

Modal’s Team plan costs $250 plus compute per month and includes $100 per month of credits. If you are evaluating Modal alone, the Starter plan is the free tier; the Team figures are here so you do not mistake the $100 for a signup offer.

What $30 converts to at listed per-second rates

The official pages do not itemize what the $30 applies to, so the sizing here is arithmetic against the published per-second rates, computed 2026-08-24. If the whole month’s credit went to a single GPU at the listed prices: an H100 SXM5 at $0.001097 per second comes to about 27,347 seconds, or roughly 7.6 hours; an A100 80 GB at $0.000694 per second is about 12 hours; a T4 at $0.000164 per second is about 50.8 hours. These are arithmetic ceilings, not a statement that the credit covers GPU line items; Modal does not publish that mapping. The scale is the point: $30 is a real but small monthly budget, not a month of anything running continuously.

Free GPU beyond the $30: the startup and academics programs

Modal also runs a startup program, and its official page advertises “thousands of free GPU credits” as a one-time grant. No dollar figure is stated, you may not reapply once you have received credits, and eligibility runs on venture funding: seed to Series A companies that raised from Modal’s VC partner network or more than $1m from any fund, with custom packages past Series B. The same page references a Modal for Academics program without stating an amount for it either. Checked 2026-08-29. So the complete picture of free GPU on Modal is the $30 per month on Starter for everyone, plus an apply-only startup grant whose size Modal does not publish.

What I have done with it

Not tested yet. I have not personally burned through a month of the allowance, so this page reports only what the official pages state.

If you want a persistent server instead of functions, see the DigitalOcean free credits entry, or read how to choose between a VPS, GPU cloud, serverless, or a sandbox. To see how Modal’s scale-to-zero model compares with a persistent GPU pod, read RunPod vs Modal. Every grant I track is listed on the credits index.