$30 a month in compute credits is real money if you’re running inference, batch jobs, or a small fine-tune. Modal gives every Starter plan user $30 in free compute credits monthly, with no monthly fee and no credit card required. If you searched for Modal free credits, this is the program you want.
Solo devs shipping a prototype, startup engineers trying to stretch runway, researchers who need short bursts of GPU time. This free tier fits all of those because Modal bills per second and scales down to zero when nothing is running.
Below: eligibility, the exact signup steps, what the credits cover, the hard limits, and a few practical ways to make the $30 go further.
Program at a Glance
| Provider | Modal |
| Credit Amount | $30/month compute credits (Starter plan) |
| Duration | Resets monthly; unused credits don’t roll over |
| Eligibility | Any user who signs up for Starter |
| Credit Card Required? | No (billing only if you exceed $30) |
| Difficulty | Easy (instant; credits appear at workspace creation) |
| Best For | Bursty inference, batch jobs, small fine-tunes |
| Official Page | Modal Program Page |
What You Actually Get
Modal’s Starter plan includes $30 in free compute credits every month and charges only for actual compute time (billed per second). You can run serverless functions, scheduled cron jobs, web endpoints for model serving, GPU-backed notebooks, and sandboxes for isolated execution. On the hardware side, Modal supports a wide range of NVIDIA GPUs from T4 through B200, plus CPU and memory billed by usage. There are no idle charges, so when your functions aren’t running, you pay nothing.
In practical terms, $30/month is enough for a lot of “spiky” work. For GPUs, Modal’s own pricing table puts you at roughly 50 hours of T4 time per month, or around a dozen hours on an A100, or roughly 5 hours on a B200. If you mostly run CPU jobs, $30 can stretch far because CPU is priced per core-second and the minimum allocation is only 0.125 cores.
Who Qualifies (and Who Doesn’t)
The Starter plan free credits are the simple part: if you can create a Modal account, you qualify, and the credits appear immediately when your workspace is created. There’s no application, no waitlist, and no “approved partners only” gate.
- You need to sign up for a Modal account using GitHub, Google, or SSO (it’s OAuth-based, not a traditional email/password form).
- No credit card is required on Starter, which is honestly one of the nicest parts of this offer.
- Expect one workspace per signup, and plan around the Starter workspace seat limit of up to 3 seats.
- If you want to run beyond the free $30 each month, you will need to add billing explicitly.
There isn’t a long list of “you’re disqualified if…” rules for the free tier in Modal’s description. The main “doesn’t qualify” scenario is practical: if you refuse OAuth sign-in (GitHub/Google/SSO), you can’t create the account, so you can’t access the credits.
How to Sign Up
Signup is quick, and the CLI setup is the only part that takes a few extra minutes.
- Go to modal.com/signup.
- Click “Continue with GitHub”, “Continue with Google”, or use SSO (there’s no email/password form).
- Authorize the Modal app. For GitHub, it requests user:email and optionally read:org for workspace invites, and it does not access your repos.
- Your workspace is created immediately with $30 in free monthly credits.
- Install the Python package locally:
pip install modal. - Run
modal setupin your terminal. This opens a browser tab so you can authenticate your CLI with a token. - You are ready to deploy. Run
modal run your_script.pyto test.
After you create the workspace, the $30/month credit is already there. If you exceed $30 without adding a payment method, your workloads stop rather than quietly charging you.
What the Credits Cover
The free credits apply to Modal compute usage on Starter, which includes CPU, memory, and GPU time billed per second. It also covers the platform primitives you actually use to ship work: serverless functions, autoscaling, scheduled jobs, and HTTPS endpoints. Modal runs on top of major cloud providers, but you do not need your own AWS or GCP account to use the Starter credits.
| Service / Feature | What It Does | Included? |
|---|---|---|
| GPUs (T4 through B200) | Run training, fine-tuning, and inference on NVIDIA GPUs. | ✓ |
| Serverless functions | Deploy Python functions with autoscaling and optional GPU attachment. | ✓ |
| Web endpoints | Expose functions as HTTPS endpoints for serving models/APIs. | ✓ |
| Volumes | Persistent distributed storage for weights, datasets, and artifacts. | ✓ |
Not everything is available on Starter. Custom domains are not available, and log retention is short (1 day), which matters more than people expect when you’re debugging production-ish endpoints.
Limitations to Know About
Every free program has catches. Modal’s are mostly operational limits rather than “we won’t let you use GPUs,” which is a good trade for a $0 plan.
- The $30 credit resets monthly, and unused credits do not roll over.
- The Starter plan caps you at 100 concurrent containers and 10-way GPU concurrency.
- You can deploy up to 5 cron jobs and 8 web endpoints on Starter.
- Starter includes 1-day log retention, 3 workspace seats, and only 3 deployment rollback versions; custom domains are not available.
When the credits run out, you don’t get auto-billed if you never added a payment method. Your workloads stop. To go beyond $30/month, you must explicitly add billing, which keeps the free tier pretty safe for experimenting.
Have Unused Modal Credits?
Free credits are great, but they also expire into nothing when you’re busy and don’t ship that month. Bigger Modal programs (like startup and academic credits) can be in the thousands, and teams often end up using only a slice before deadlines hit. If you’re sitting on Modal credits you won’t realistically burn down, AI Credit Mart lets you sell unused credits instead of watching them go to waste.
Need More Modal Credits?
Once you hit the $30/month ceiling, the next step is usually adding billing or moving up to Team. Another option is buying discounted credits. AI Credit Mart lists Modal credits from companies with surplus allocations, often at 30–70% below retail, which is a clean way to extend your runway for inference and experiments.
Tips for Getting the Most Out of Your Credits
- Keep Starter “safe mode” enabled by not adding a payment method until you’re ready, because workloads stop when you exceed $30 instead of charging you.
- Use Modal Volumes for model weights and large artifacts so you’re not re-downloading files on each cold start.
- For large dataset storage, Modal recommends Cloudflare R2 over S3 due to zero egress fees, and you can mount cloud buckets as file systems.
- If you already have committed cloud spend, consider routing usage through the AWS or GCP Marketplace so it draws from existing commitments.
- Be honest about workload shape. Always-on 24/7 services can be cheaper on reserved GPU providers, while Modal shines for bursty and autoscaling usage.
Frequently Asked Questions
They’re worth $30 of Modal compute usage every month on the Starter plan. Based on Modal’s published GPU prices, that’s roughly 50 hours on a T4, around 15 hours on an L40S, about a dozen hours on an A100-class GPU, or roughly 5 hours on a B200 (give or take). For CPU workloads, the value stretches further because you pay per core-second and there are no idle charges. The best use is bursty work: batch inference, scheduled jobs, or short fine-tunes that can scale up and then drop back to zero.
No.
They reset every month, and unused credits do not roll over.
Yes. If you have Modal credits you won’t use before they expire, you can list them on AI Credit Mart and sell them at up to 70% of face value. Companies regularly list surplus credits from startup programs and enterprise agreements.
AI Credit Mart has discounted Modal credits available from companies with surplus allocations. Prices are typically 30-70% below retail.
Unused Starter credits don’t carry forward, and the monthly allocation resets.
Starter includes 10 GPU concurrency, up to 100 concurrent containers, 5 deployed cron jobs, and 8 deployed web endpoints. You also get 1-day log retention, up to 3 workspace seats, and only 3 rollback versions per deployment. Custom domains aren’t available on Starter.
Not unless you add billing. Modal notes there’s no billing surprise risk on Starter: if you exceed $30 without a payment method, workloads stop rather than incurring charges, and you must explicitly add billing to go past the free tier.
Modal’s $30/month free tier is one of the cleaner deals in compute: per-second billing, real GPUs, and no credit card gate. Claim it, build something bursty, and if you end up with surplus credits later, you’ve got a place to sell them.
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