What's free
$30/month recurring credit (Starter plan)
Rate limits
Starter: 100 containers + 10 GPU concurrency, 5 crons, 1-day log retention
The catch
Corrected from a previously listed "$5-30/month" range; this is a recurring monthly credit, not a one-time trial. Modal is serverless compute you deploy models on, not a hosted model API The full $30/month credit requires adding a payment method (without one the free credit is $5/month).
Quickstart
First-party API — not OpenAI-compatible, so there is no drop-in base URL. The exact endpoint is in the official docs; authenticate with your API key in the Authorization: Bearer header.
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY" \
https://<api-base-url>/<endpoint>…or in Python:
import os, requests
r = requests.post(
"https:///",
headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['API_KEY']}"},
json={},
)
print(r.json()) Change history
How this free tier has changed since we started tracking it (2026-07-30) — generated from the git history of providers.json.
- 2026-08-14 Updated the catch, card requirement
- 2026-07-30 Updated OpenAI compatibility
- 2026-07-30 Added to the hub