Modal

If you’re building AI agents that execute code — whether it’s a coding agent running tests, a data analysis pipeline spinning up Python interpreters, or a multi-agent system that needs isolated environments per task — the sandbox you pick directly determines your cost structure, your latency profile, and how much state management code you have to write yourself. Three providers dominate this space in 2026: E2B, Modal, and Fly.io. Each one has a fundamentally different pricing model, cold start story, and persistence strategy. I’ve been running production agent workloads on all three for the past six months, and the differences are bigger than the marketing suggests. ...

Modal and Replicate are the two most-cited serverless ML deployment platforms in 2026, but they solve completely different problems. If you are an ML engineer building custom pipelines, Modal is the answer. If you are a full-stack developer who wants to call open-source models via a REST API in under an hour, Replicate is the answer. This guide cuts through the marketing to give you the data you need: cold start benchmarks, GPU throughput numbers, per-second pricing breakdowns, and a clear decision framework for which platform belongs in your stack. ...