Crusoe Cloud vs Modal

Crusoe Cloud

The v1 REST API has a published OpenAPI description, Markdown docs, HMAC-signed keys, reader roles and a 90-day audit log, with on-demand GPU prices public. No idempotency keys or control-plane rate limits were found, spot and B200 prices go through sales, and a storage outage in eu-norway1 lasted about four hours on 29 September 2026.

Modal

Scale to zero by default, per-second billing and about one-second container boots. No REST API or OpenAPI spec for deploying or invoking Functions.

Crusoe Cloud

1. Sign every request. Build the payload from path, sorted query string, verb and X-Crusoe-Timestamp, HMAC-SHA256 it with the base64url-decoded secret, and send Authorization: Bearer 1.0:<access_key_id>:<signature>.
2. Use https://api.cloud.crusoe.ai/v1. Some docs pages and the MCP server still name api.crusoecloud.com and /v1alpha5.
3. Creates, updates and deletes return an operation. Poll the matching operations endpoint for state, and list existing resources by name before retrying a create, because no idempotency key was found.
4. Managed AI uses separate Intelligence API keys and hosts, api.inference.crusoecloud.com for OpenAI-compatible calls and api.intelligence.crusoecloud.com for files and fine-tuning jobs.
5. Delete a VM and its disks to stop charges. A stopped on-demand VM is not billed for compute, but its 128 GB OS disk still bills at $0.08 a GiB-month.

Modal

1. Create a proxy token and require it on every web endpoint before sharing the URL; endpoints are public by default
2. Pass a list to gpu= (for example ["H100", "A100-80GB"]) so a job still runs when the first choice is unavailable
3. Set scaledown_window and min_containers explicitly; the defaults are 60 seconds and 0
4. Use .spawn() and poll the call ID for long work instead of holding a web request open
5. Keep web endpoint traffic under 200 requests a second or ask Modal to raise the limit