Arcade.devFreemium
One control point for the actions agents take in real systems — user-scoped auth, 8,000+ permission-aware tools, and an audit trail per action.
AI Infrastructure comparison
Arcade.dev vs Modal
Pricing, pros, cons, and ideal use cases — side by side.
ModalFreemium
A serverless cloud for running AI and data workloads — define infrastructure in Python and get on-demand GPUs without managing servers.
At a glance
| Arcade.dev | Modal | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | FreemiumFree $0/month with 2,000 auth events and 2,000 tool calls, community support, no credit card. Team $25/month plus usage at $0.10 per auth event and $0.01 per tool call, with next-business-day email support. Enterprise is custom with annual bundles, cloud, VPC or air-gapped deployment, SSO, RBAC, audit logs, private registry access, and 24/7 SLA. Priced by what agents do, not per seat. | FreemiumUsage-based compute pricing with a recurring free credit allowance for getting started. |
| Category | AI Infrastructure | AI Infrastructure |
| Ideal for | Platform teams putting agents into production against real SaaS systemsSecurity teams that have blocked an agent project over service-account accessCompanies building internal agents on Salesforce, Google Workspace, or SlackTeams standing up MCP servers who need auth and audit around them | Engineering teams running GPU and batch AI jobsTeams doing fine-tuning and large-scale inferenceOrgs wanting infrastructure defined in code |
Pros & cons
Arcade.dev
Pros
- Agents act as a specific user, not a god-mode service account
- Published usage pricing in a category that is usually demo-gated
- 8,000+ pre-built permission-aware tools plus custom MCP support
- Per-action audit trail — the artifact security actually asks for
- SOC 2 certified, with VPC and air-gapped deployment options
Cons
- Another layer between your agent and its tools — added latency and a new dependency
- Usage pricing on auth events can surprise you at high user counts
- Only worth it once agents take write actions, not just read
- Requires engineering integration; not a business-user product
- Tool coverage is broad but you should verify your specific systems
Modal
Pros
- Define and scale infrastructure directly in Python
- On-demand GPUs with no cluster management
- Scales to zero — low idle cost
- Fast iteration for AI engineering teams
Cons
- Developer-centric — needs engineering capacity
- Usage costs need monitoring on heavy workloads
- Not a turnkey product for non-technical teams
Which should you choose?
Arcade.dev is built around platform teams putting agents into production against real saas systems; Modal leans more toward engineering teams running gpu and batch ai jobs. Shortlist the one whose strengths line up with your biggest constraint.
Still deciding between Arcade.dev and Modal?
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