Modal Sandbox switches to usage-based billing
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Modal introduces default-on burst resource billing for Sandbox: charges are based on actual per-second usage, with a small reserved request serving as the billing floor. Modal says that in one coding agent task example, this model saved 58% compared with fixed reserved resources. By default, each Sandbox reserves only 0.125 CPU cores and 128 MiB of memory; CPU can burst above the requested amount up to 16 cores, and memory has no upper limit. Users can proactively request more resources to guarantee availability, but these resources are billed even when the Sandbox is idle; Sandboxes whose memory usage exceeds the configured limit will be stopped.
AI overview based on source reports · Updated 2 days ago
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- Modal BlogSandbox resourcing: burst, don't reserve
Modal argues that fixed-resource reservations fit poorly with bursty Sandbox workloads, since a typical Sandbox spends more than half its life using under 6% of its peak CPU, so users over-reserve and pay for peak constantly. Modal's Sandboxes now burst by default from a base request of 0.125 cores and 128 MiB, with active-resource pricing billed each second for what is used, and the company cites 58% savings versus a fixed-size reservation on an illustrative 20-minute coding agent task. It also describes an OOM SLO of below 0.0001% per minute for bursting Sandboxes under 8 GiB and tools like exit snapshots and the termination reasons SDK to reduce eviction impact.
Activity for this story
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- Peak comparable activity
- 8Nov 13 11:00
- Change in the past 24 hours
- -50%
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