Krova Cloud vs Modal
Serverless AI infrastructure — inference, training, and sandboxes. Here is the same machine priced both ways, the arithmetic that produced each number, and what a Cube gives you beyond the price.
Cubes from $2.92/moThis machine $10.22/moNo credit card to sign up
At 2 vCPU · 4 GB RAM · 40 GB disk, Krova Cloud costs
94%
less than Modal
Their figure read from their own pricing page on
The same machine, both prices
Both sides priced at 2 vCPU · 4 GB RAM · 40 GB disk, running 24/7. Theirs comes from their own pricing page; ours is computed from the live rate card the product bills from.
Krova Cloud
$10.22 /mo
$0.0140/hr · billed by the minute
Modal
$173.71 /mo
$0.2380/hr
At this size Krova Cloud costs 94% less than Modal.
What you get on a Cube that you don't get there
Price is the headline. This is the part that decides whether you stay.
No session ceiling and no serverless lifecycle. A Cube is a machine that stays up until you stop it, not a function invocation that has to be kept warm.
Full root access into a real Linux server — systemd, Docker, kernel modules, any package manager — rather than a Python-decorator programming model you have to fit your app into.
Roughly a twentieth of the price at the same 2 vCPU / 4 GB shape, on their own published sandbox rates.
The same Cube becomes your production host, so a prototype does not need re-platforming when it works.
Snapshot a warm base once, then clone it into a fresh Cube per run — every agent starts from a known-good machine instead of rebuilding its environment.
Export any Cube as a portable .cube archive and import it again — your environment is a file you hold, not state that only exists inside one vendor.
Before you decide
Where do these Modal numbers come from?
From Modal's own pricing page, opened in a browser and read off it on 2026-09-26 — not from a blog post, a comparison site or memory. The rates and the arithmetic are printed above so you can redo the sum yourself, and once any comparison on this site passes ninety days, an automated test fails on every change we make to the site, so a stale reading cannot sit here quietly.
Why is Krova Cloud cheaper at the same size?
You pay per resource — $0.001 per vCPU-hour, $0.0025 per GB of RAM and $0.00005 per GB of disk — instead of buying a fixed plan and rounding up to whatever it includes. There is no subscription, so what you pay for is the machine you asked for, by the minute — and every GB of RAM and disk in it is reserved 1:1 against real hardware.
What am I committing to?
Nothing monthly. There is no subscription and no minimum — you top up prepaid credit and pay for the minutes a Cube runs, and powering one off stops compute billing that same minute, with only its disk still billing. Signing up is free. Claim $5 in free credit — one-time, per account, and nothing is charged for it.
What exactly is a Cube?
A Firecracker microVM with its own Linux kernel and full root access, inside a per-cube jailer sandbox — install anything, run systemd, run Docker, and leave it up as long as you like. Your app is public; your server isn't: outbound is open on every port except 25 (blocked to stop spam), so package installs, image pulls and API calls all work normally, while nothing reaches in until you map a port, and every mapping takes an IP allowlist. Custom domains run through the managed HTTPS ingress, so the origin is never exposed.
Run the same machine for $10.22 a month
No subscription and no minimum — top up prepaid credit, size a Cube however you like, and compute billing stops the minute you power it off. Signing up is free. Claim $5 in free credit — one-time, per account, and nothing is charged for it.