Is AWS EC2 P5 or Modal H100 cheaper in 2026?

Modal H100 is cheaper in all 3 modelled workloads.

Which has the better free tier, AWS EC2 P5 or Modal H100?

Neither publishes a free tier; both bill from the first unit of usage.

What do these estimates not include?

Committed-use and reserved discounts, regional price variation, per-request API charges, support plans, and minimum retention periods. All of those move real invoices, sometimes by a lot. These figures compare published list prices for the same workload, which is the comparison the rate cards alone cannot give you.

AWS EC2 P5 vs Modal H100

Modal H100 is cheaper across every workload modelled here.

List prices checked May 2026

Rate cards side by side

Only the axes at least one of them bills on. A dash means that provider does not charge for it.

Billing axis	AWS EC2 P5	Modal H100	Difference
Free tier	No	No	—

Source: Amazon Web Services pricing (May 2026) · Modal pricing (May 2026). Published list prices only — committed-use discounts, regional variation, and per-request charges are not included. Not yet independently re-checked against the vendor’s page.

Monthly cost for three real workloads

The rate cards applied to identical usage. This is where the winner changes.

Workload	AWS EC2 P5	Modal H100	Cheaper
Side projectA personal site or small app with modest traffic, a few gigabytes of assets, and one small always-on process.	$5,526	$2,884	Modal H100saves $2,643/mo (48%)
Growing SaaSA funded product serving a few thousand daily users, with an image-heavy frontend and two application servers.	$11,052	$5,767	Modal H100saves $5,285/mo (48%)
Media-heavy siteA publisher or video product where delivery dominates the bill and compute is almost an afterthought.	$5,526	$2,884	Modal H100saves $2,643/mo (48%)

Workload definitions are identical on every comparison page, so figures here can be read against any other pair in the same category.

What each one is for

AWS EC2 P5

by Amazon Web Services

Eight H100s per instance on demand, at roughly four times the specialist rate. Savings plans and capacity blocks are how this comes down; the list price is a starting point for negotiation.

Modal H100

by Modal

Serverless GPUs billed per second with genuine scale-to-zero. The hourly rate is high because you never pay for idle — for bursty inference that inverts the comparison.

Common questions

Is AWS EC2 P5 or Modal H100 cheaper in 2026?: Modal H100 is cheaper in all 3 modelled workloads.
Which has the better free tier, AWS EC2 P5 or Modal H100?: Neither publishes a free tier; both bill from the first unit of usage.
What do these estimates not include?: Committed-use and reserved discounts, regional price variation, per-request API charges, support plans, and minimum retention periods. All of those move real invoices, sometimes by a lot. These figures compare published list prices for the same workload, which is the comparison the rate cards alone cannot give you.