Modal

Modal is a serverless compute platform that runs your Python code on cloud GPUs with per-second billing and zero idle cost. The free Starter plan includes $30 in compute credits every month — enough for roughly 50 hours on a T4 or 12 hours on an A100 — which students use for Stable Diffusion and ComfyUI image generation, Whisper transcription, running LLM inference endpoints, fine-tuning models for coursework, and batch data jobs. Containers cold-start in under a second, environments are defined in Python with no Dockerfiles or config files, and workloads simply pause if you hit the $30 cap, so there's never a surprise bill.