Modal vs Aquanode
Serverless compute platform: functions and containers on GPUs, billed per second
Modal is a serverless platform, not a GPU rental product, and comparing hourly rates is slightly unfair to both of us. If your work is Python functions that should scale to zero between calls and come back in seconds, Modal is better than anything we offer: our jobs scale to zero too, but they restore a box rather than start a container. If it is a long-lived environment you SSH into and keep changing, or a job that runs for hours and has to survive losing its machine, that is our shape.
Where Modal wins
- True serverless: scale to zero, per-second billing, fast container cold starts. You pay only while code runs, which for bursty workloads is dramatically cheaper than any hourly rate.
- A strong Python-native developer experience, with the environment defined in code rather than assembled by hand on a box.
- No idle spend to forget about: the failure mode where you leave a box running for a week does not exist there.
Where Aquanode wins
- A persistent, interactive box you can SSH into and mutate, for the large class of work that does not decompose into stateless functions: ComfyUI graphs with custom nodes, iterative fine-tuning, anything you tune by hand.
- Supply moved, the price moved, or the region ran dry. Your environment follows you out. It is not stranded in the account that happened to create it, which is the part that makes leaving any single vendor cheap.
- Pause and resume in place on every provider we support: it's a snapshot-and-terminate, then a fresh box restored from that snapshot, the same mechanism everywhere. (Voltage Park's adapter supports it too, it just has no live GPUs to rent right now.) On any provider, the same environment also comes back by restoring your saved setup onto a fresh box, a little slower, same result.
- Turn on automatic snapshots yourself and pick the interval (as often as every 15 minutes, 30 by default) instead of remembering to snapshot by hand or wiring up your own cron job.
- One account, one bill and one set of keys across every provider we support, rather than a separate login and invoice per vendor every time you chase capacity.
- Run a saved version of your setup as a job. If a provider takes the box back mid-run, we detect the loss and queue the run to retry on a different provider, excluding the one that just lost it, and if the job checkpoints the next attempt picks up from the last one. Jobs scale to zero when the queue empties, so an idle one is not sitting on a rented GPU, and every job is bounded in the unit we bill: its time limit times its attempts times its machines is the most a single run can cost.
Modal pricing vs Aquanode
Modal figures are GPU compute, per GPU per hour (billed per second in practice), read from their own pricing page on 2026-08-05. The Aquanode column is the lowest live per-GPU rate in our marketplace feed and moves on its own. The two columns are not measured the same way, so treat this as a starting point, not a quote.
Source: https://modal.com/pricing, GPU compute, per GPU per hour (billed per second in practice). Verified 2026-08-05. Vendors change prices; check theirs before deciding.
What we do not claim
Restoring an environment requires a snapshot that already exists. Stopping a deployment yourself captures it on the way out, so you can bring it back later on any provider. A provider-side termination is different: it is only recoverable if you had already switched automated snapshots on for that deployment, and it costs you the work since the last one. Automated snapshots are opt-in, nothing runs until you start it, and with none running there is nothing to restore.
`aq deploy --snapshot <id>` rents the cheapest matching GPU and restores your snapshot onto it, including onto a different provider than the one it came from. Creating the snapshot is a separate step today: the standalone ogre CLI on the box writes it.
Modal vs Aquanode: common questions
Is Modal cheaper than renting a GPU by the hour?
For bursty work, almost certainly. You are not paying for idle time. Their hourly rate is higher than most rental capacity precisely because you are meant to use very little of it. Compare on your actual duty cycle, not on the headline rate.
Can I get a persistent interactive environment on Modal?
Modal is designed around ephemeral, code-defined environments. If your workflow is an environment you build up by hand and want back tomorrow, that is the gap this comparison is about.
Does Modal have a free tier?
Modal's Starter plan costs $0 per month plus compute and includes $30 per month in free credits. Its Team plan is $250 per month plus compute and includes $100 per month in free credits.
Source: https://modal.com/pricing, read 2026-09-02.
How is Modal billed?
By the second. Modal's pricing page lists a per-second rate for every GPU, CPU core and gigabyte of memory, and states that you never pay for idle resources, only actual compute time. Volumes are $0.09 per GiB per month, with 1 TiB per month included.
Source: https://modal.com/pricing, read 2026-09-02.
