How does Baseten pricing compare to other ML infrastructure tools?

Baseten is the most expensive per GPU-hour of the four main options as of November 4, 2026, but bundles the most managed serving. A single H100 costs about $6.50 an hour on Baseten ($0.10833 a minute, billed per minute), $3.95 on Modal ($0.001097 a second), $5.49 on Replicate ($0.001525 a second), and $3.99 on a RunPod Secure Cloud pod ($2.69 on Community Cloud, $5.39 on RunPod Serverless). Baseten's premium buys optimized inference engines, autoscaling, Model APIs and an Enterprise option to run in your own cloud.

Is Baseten cheaper than Modal?

Not on list price. Modal's per-second rates are lower for every comparable GPU on November 4, 2026: H100 $3.95 an hour vs Baseten's $6.50, H200 $4.54 vs $7.50, B200 $6.25 vs about $9.98, A100 80GB $2.50 vs $4.00. Modal also bills per second against Baseten's per-minute metering. Baseten can still win on total cost if its engines serve more requests per GPU, which you must benchmark on your own model.

What does an always-on H100 cost per month on each platform?

At list prices on November 4, 2026, for 720 hours (30 days): Baseten about $4,680, Replicate about $3,953, RunPod Secure Cloud pod about $2,873, Modal about $2,844 and RunPod Community Cloud about $1,937. These are our arithmetic on each vendor's published hourly or per-second rate, before any committed-use discount, region multiplier or storage.

Which is the cheapest platform for spiky inference traffic?

Modal for most teams: it bills per second, scales to zero, and its Starter plan is $0 plus compute with $30 of free credits a month. RunPod Serverless is the alternative if you want lower rates on consumer and mid-range GPUs. Baseten scale-to-zero works too, but each wake-up bills the model load time by the minute.

Quick Answer

Baseten Pricing Compared to Other ML Infrastructure Tools

Published: November 4, 2026

The short answer

Baseten charges more per GPU-hour than Modal, Replicate or RunPod, and it is the one you pick for managed, optimized production serving, not for the cheapest raw GPU. On November 4, 2026 a single H100 lists at about $6.50/hour on Baseten, $5.49 on Replicate, $3.99 on a RunPod Secure Cloud pod and $3.95 on Modal. Pick:

Baseten — custom or fine-tuned models in production where latency and reliability matter more than GPU price.
Modal — Python teams with spiky or batch workloads; per-second billing and the lowest serverless H100 rate.
RunPod — the lowest raw GPU price (Community Cloud), if you can run your own serving stack.
Replicate — public models priced per output (images, video) and quick demos.

This page is a spoke of our Baseten evaluation; for how Baseten’s minute meter behaves, see Baseten billing and cost control.

GPU prices side by side (November 4, 2026)

GPU	Baseten (per min → per hr)	Modal (per sec → per hr)	Replicate	RunPod pod (Secure / Community)	RunPod Serverless
H100 80GB	$0.10833 → ~$6.50	$0.001097 → ~$3.95	$0.001525/s → $5.49	$3.99 / $2.69	$5.39
H200 141GB	$0.125 → $7.50	$0.001261 → ~$4.54	—	$5.29 / $3.59	$6.99
B200 180GB	$0.16633 → ~$9.98	$0.001736 → ~$6.25	—	$7.99 / $5.98	$10.79
A100 80GB	$0.06667 → ~$4.00	$0.000694 → ~$2.50	$5.04	$1.79 / $1.39 (SXM)	$2.72
RTX PRO 6000 96GB	$0.06667 → ~$4.00	$0.000842 → ~$3.03	—	$2.49 (Secure)	$3.49
Billing unit	Per minute, per replica	Per second	Per second	Per second / hour	Per second

Baseten rates are from its instance-type reference, Modal’s from its pricing page, Replicate’s from its hardware price list and RunPod’s from its pricing page (updated October 28, 2026). Hourly figures for Baseten and Modal are our conversion.

Hardware is not identical: a Baseten H100 instance includes 16 vCPUs and 118 GiB of RAM, and RunPod’s SXM and PCIe H100s are priced separately ($3.99 SXM, $2.89 PCIe on Secure Cloud). Compare the instance that actually fits your model.

What each platform’s price includes

Baseten. You pay for every minute a replica runs, including cold start and model load, and the image build after each push. In return you get Truss packaging, TensorRT-LLM and other optimized engines, autoscaling, environments, async inference and per-token Model APIs for popular open models. Enterprise adds self-hosted deployments in your own cloud. There is no perpetual free tier; new workspaces get starting credits.

Modal. Pure usage billing by the CPU cycle and GPU second, with plan fees on top: Starter $0 (+$30 credits a month, 10 GPU concurrency), Team $250/month (+$100 credits, 50 GPU concurrency, environment-level budgets), Enterprise custom. Region selection costs 1.15–1.75× base price, and GPU functions are preemptible by default. You can transact through AWS and GCP marketplaces to burn committed spend.

Replicate. Public models are billed per second of hardware or per output (for example $0.04 per FLUX 1.1 Pro image). Private models on dedicated hardware bill for setup, idle and active time — the same trap as an always-warm Baseten replica — except fast-booting fine-tunes, which bill only while processing.

RunPod. The cheapest GPUs, in three shapes: Pods (dedicated instances, Community or Secure Cloud), Serverless (per-second workers) and Clusters. You run the serving stack yourself (vLLM, SGLang) unless you use its Public Endpoints.

What an always-on H100 costs per month

720 hours (30 days) at list price, our arithmetic:

Platform	Monthly
Baseten	~$4,680
Replicate	~$3,953
RunPod Secure pod (SXM)	~$2,873
Modal	~$2,844
RunPod Community pod (SXM)	~$1,937

The gap narrows when traffic is spiky — all four can scale to zero — and when Baseten’s engines push more tokens through each GPU. A model that needs 3 H100s on a plain vLLM pod and 2 on a tuned Baseten deployment costs about the same.

Picks by situation

Custom model, production SLA, small platform team: Baseten. You are paying for the serving layer you would otherwise build.
Spiky traffic, Python codebase, batch jobs: Modal — per-second billing and the cheapest serverless H100 and B200.
Steady 24/7 load and an engineer who can run vLLM: a RunPod Secure Cloud pod, or Community Cloud if your data policy allows it.
You only call popular open models: skip GPU rental and use per-token APIs — see Baseten vs Together AI vs Fireworks.
Large clusters (B200/B300, multi-node): compare neoclouds in our best GPU cloud for open-source LLMs.

How to compare fairly

Benchmark tokens per second per GPU with your model and engine on each platform; price per million tokens served is the number that matters.
Count idle minutes. Multiply your expected warm-replica hours, not your request hours.
Add the hidden lines: region multipliers (Modal), image builds and cold starts (Baseten), storage and egress (RunPod, Modal).
Ask for commitments. Baseten Pro/Enterprise, Modal Enterprise and RunPod reserved clusters all discount against list.

Last verified: November 4, 2026.