{"slug": "benchmarking-serverless-gpus-modal-vs-runpod-vs-replicate-cold-starts-2026", "title": "Benchmarking Serverless GPUs: Modal vs RunPod vs Replicate Cold Starts (2026)", "summary": "A developer benchmarked cold start latencies and costs across serverless GPU platforms, finding Modal fastest at 1.8 seconds on an A100, followed by RunPod at 4.2 seconds and Replicate at 6.5 seconds. The results highlight trade-offs between scale-to-zero convenience and latency for production LLM deployments.", "body_md": "Deploying open-source LLMs (like Llama-3) or real-time Whisper transcription in production often forces a difficult architectural trade-off: keep dedicated GPUs running 24/7 (expensive) or rely on serverless scale-to-zero (cold start latency penalty).\n\nTo evaluate container spin-up overhead, we benchmarked median cold start latencies and per-second execution costs across the major serverless GPU platforms.\n\n| Provider | GPU | Median Cold Start | Equiv. Hourly Rate | Scale-To-Zero |\n|---|---|---|---|---|\nModal |\nA100 (40GB) | 1.8s | ~$2.85 / hr | Yes |\nRunPod Serverless |\nA100 (80GB) | 4.2s | ~$2.59 / hr | Yes |\nReplicate |\nA100 (80GB) | 6.5s | ~$4.14 / hr | Yes |\nTogether AI |\nH100 Cluster | Instant (Pooled) | Token-based | N/A |\nLambda Labs |\nA100 (80GB) | VM Boot (~45s) | $1.89 / hr | No |\n\nThe full benchmark dataset, hardware configurations, and testing scripts are maintained at [ServerlessGPUBench](https://serverlessgpubench.com).\n\nRaw benchmark metrics are also open-sourced on GitHub: [awesome-serverless-gpu-latency](https://github.com/mrzitoun/awesome-serverless-gpu-latency).", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/benchmarking-serverless-gpus-modal-vs-runpod-vs-replicate-cold-starts-2026", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/mrzitoun/benchmarking-serverless-gpus-modal-vs-runpod-vs-replicate-cold-starts-2026-a5c", "published_at": "2026-09-03 20:13:13+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-03 20:25:08.208244+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-infrastructure", "ai-tools", "mlops"], "entities": ["Modal", "RunPod", "Replicate", "Together AI", "Lambda Labs", "A100", "H100"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/benchmarking-serverless-gpus-modal-vs-runpod-vs-replicate-cold-starts-2026", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/benchmarking-serverless-gpus-modal-vs-runpod-vs-replicate-cold-starts-2026.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/benchmarking-serverless-gpus-modal-vs-runpod-vs-replicate-cold-starts-2026.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/benchmarking-serverless-gpus-modal-vs-runpod-vs-replicate-cold-starts-2026.jsonld"}}