Reference
Limits & cost
What a computer costs, what bounds it, and why bills cannot run away.
What you pay for
| Item | Billed |
|---|---|
| Computer awake | Active hours, by the minute. |
| Computer suspended | Disk only. |
| Model usage | By your provider, on your account. Never through Modem. |
During the private alpha, accounts are free: one computer, a modest hour allowance, no payment method.
Machine size
One size for now: 2 vCPU, 2 GB of memory, 10 GB of persistent disk, in Paris. Enough for agents, builds and test suites; not for training models or running production traffic. Larger sizes come when someone hits the ceiling for a good reason.
The guardrails
- Every job has a hard timeout, 30 minutes by default, 4 hours maximum. No exceptions, no way to opt out.
- Aggressive suspension. Minutes of idleness and the machine stops counting.
- Prepaid only. No overdraft, no negative balance, no compute without credit.
- One computer per account during the alpha; more is a deliberate act, never an accident.
◗
A misbehaving agent can waste its own timeout. It cannot open machines, cannot reach your laptop, and cannot spend money you have not put in.
Keeping the bill small
- Detach when you stop working: an attached session keeps the machine awake.
- Give long jobs a realistic
--timeoutrather than the maximum. - Keep the disk tidy; it is the only permanent cost.
- Prefer one computer per project rather than one per experiment.
Not for
Public ports, always-on services, GPUs and production workloads are out of scope. Modem is a workbench for agents, and stays one.