Foundation Model — hobby stack.
For each requirement below, pick the option that fits your build — recommended first, then free and cheaper alternatives — or skip what your project doesn't need. Tap the info icon next to any requirement to see why it matters.
GPU Supercluster / Training Compute (A100/H100/B200)
Where your code actually runs and serves requests. Picking the right host affects speed, scaling, and how much ops work you do.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: Colab T4 12GB 5h/day limited, Kaggle 30h P100/wk, Lightning 22h T4/mo. Cheaper: Vast.ai 4090 $0.69/hr, 2xH100 $3.98/hr; RunPod Secure H100 $2.89/hr, Community $1.99/hr. Paid: CoreWeave H100 $3.96-4.76/hr per GPU ($31.68-38.08/8x), AWS p5.48xlarge $98.32/hr ($12.29/GPU), Lambda 8xH100 $32.08/hr ($4.01/GPU), Azure ND96 $99.76/hr. Spot 40-60% off. B200 ~$7-9/hr/GPU in 2026. Overage: inter-node egress $0.01/GB.
Distributed Training Framework
A piece of your stack you may or may not need, depending on scope. Pick the option that fits — or skip it if your project doesn’t require this capability yet.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: PyTorch DDP, DeepSpeed OSS, Accelerate, Colossal-AI free self-host unlimited. Cheaper: Self-host on RunPod/Vast at $0.69/hr infra, no license. Paid: Anyscale free 20 core-hrs/mo then $0.55/vCPU/hr + $2000/mo platform. Databricks Mosaic training overhead $0.00065/token (~$9750 for 15T tokens). Deterministic AI $2k/mo.
Data Lake / Object Storage (Petabyte Scale)
Where you keep files users upload or you serve — images, videos, documents — and how fast they reach visitors around the world.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: MinIO OSS unlimited self-host, R2 Free 10GB, 10M Class A ops, 10M Class B, zero egress. S3 Free Tier 5GB 12mo. Cheaper: B2 $6/TB/mo storage, free downloads 3x stored/day, $0.01/GB over. Wasabi $6.99/TB zero egress, min 90d retention. Paid: S3 $23/TB/mo + $0.005/1k PUT + $0.09/GB egress. GCS $20/TB + egress $0.12/GB. 100PB dataset = $2.3M/mo S3. R2 $15/TB + $4.50/M operations.
Data Pipeline / ETL for Training Data (Spark, Ray Data)
A piece of your stack you may or may not need, depending on scope. Pick the option that fits — or skip it if your project doesn’t require this capability yet.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: Spark OSS self-host on K8s free, Ray Data OSS free, DuckDB free single node. Cheaper: Modal free $30 credit/mo then CPU $0.000046/sec, Coiled free 5k OCPU-hrs. Dagster OSS free. Paid: Databricks $0.40/DBU + EC2 = $0.75-1.50/hr per node DBU+EC2 combined, Photon $0.60/DBU. AWS EMR $0.27/hr per m5.xlarge + EC2 $0.192/hr = $0.462/hr. Glue free 1M objects + 1 DPU-hr/mo then $0.44/DPU-hr.
Checkpoint Storage (High-speed NVMe + S3)
Where you keep files users upload or you serve — images, videos, documents — and how fast they reach visitors around the world.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: Instance NVMe 8x3.84TB free with p4d.24xlarge/p5. JuiceFS OSS free + S3 cost only. Cheaper: RunPod Volume $0.10/GB/mo = $100/TB/mo, Vast included. JuiceFS Cloud Free 10GB then $0.02/GB metadata + S3. Paid: FSx Lustre $0.14/GB/mo = $140/TB + throughput $3.90/MBps-month. EFS $300/TB/mo. Weka $0.25/GB = $250/TB/mo + IOPs. S3 Express $0.16/GB = $160/TB/mo + $0.0025/1k GET. 70B model ckpt 140GB x500 =70TB ~$7k-21k/mo.
Experiment Tracking / MLOps Platform (W&B, MLflow)
Ships features to a subset of users or toggles them without redeploying. De-risks releases and enables experiments.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: W&B Free 100GB storage, 1 team, personal unlimited experiments, 1h system metrics. MLflow OSS unlimited self-host free. Cheaper: Neptune Free 100GB, 10GB monthly tracking. Comet Free 5000h/mo + 2GB. Paid: W&B Team $50/u/mo 5-seat min $250/mo 250GB storage. Enterprise $100/u/mo 1TB + SSO. Overage: $0.50/GB storage, $0.10/1k API calls. MLflow Managed free w/ Databricks.
Model Registry & Versioning
Powers AI features — model access, embeddings, and inference. Costs scale with usage, so watch the meter.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: HF Hub free unlimited public models, 10 private repos 100GB bandwidth. MLflow OSS free unlimited. Cheaper: HF Pro $9/mo 1 private org, 1TB bandwidth, 300GB storage. DVC + S3 $23/TB. Paid: HF Enterprise Cloud $20/user/mo + infra. JFrog Pro $98/mo 5 users 25GB. Databricks UC free with compute. Model size 70B 140GB x20 versions 2.8TB ~ $64/mo S3.
Tokenization / Data Processing Service
A piece of your stack you may or may not need, depending on scope. Pick the option that fits — or skip it if your project doesn’t require this capability yet.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: Tokenizers OSS 1M+ tok/sec per core, unlimited free, tiktoken OSS free, SentencePiece OSS free local. Cheaper: Modal CPU $0.000046/sec => tokenize 1B tokens ~$0.50. Self-host free. Paid: Cohere $0.10/1M tokens tokenization API, 15T tokens = $1500 API cost, better OSS $2000 GPU compute 500 H100-hrs Ray Data $4/hr = $2000 one-time for 15T.
Evaluation Harness / Benchmarking (HELM, LM-Eval)
A piece of your stack you may or may not need, depending on scope. Pick the option that fits — or skip it if your project doesn’t require this capability yet.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: LM-Eval Harness free self-host unlimited benchmarks, HELM free. HF Evaluate OSS free. Cheaper: HF Inference free 30k req/mo then $0.06/1k req. Modal eval $2.10/hr H100. Paid: Scale AI eval $2-5k per full run (100 tasks x 70B). LangSmith Plus $59/mo 10k eval traces, $0.50/1k over. Anyscale evaluation endpoints: Llama 70B $0.25/1M input, $1/1M output. Full benchmark suite 500M tokens ~ $200-500.
Container Orchestration (Kubernetes for Training)
A piece of your stack you may or may not need, depending on scope. Pick the option that fits — or skip it if your project doesn’t require this capability yet.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: k3s OSS free self-host, Kind/MicroK8s free local unlimited. Cheaper: EKS free credit $144? Actually GKE free 1 zonal cluster free, Autopilot $0.10/vCPU/hr. EKS $0.10/hr per cluster = $72/mo. Paid: EKS $144/mo with extended support + $0.10/hr. Karpenter free. 1000 GPU cluster control plane $144/mo + 1000 x EC2 $4/hr = $4k/hr compute. Anyscale $2000/mo platform + compute.
Artifact Registry / Container Registry
A piece of your stack you may or may not need, depending on scope. Pick the option that fits — or skip it if your project doesn’t require this capability yet.Pricing & free-tier limitsFree: GHCR 500MB private storage + 2k mins Actions free, unlimited public. ECR Public free pulls. Docker Hub free 1 private repo 200 pulls/6h. Cheaper: ECR private $0.10/GB/mo storage, data transfer free within region to EC2. GitLab free 10GB registry. Paid: Docker Hub Pro $9/mo 5 private repos unlimited pulls. JFrog Pro $98/mo 5 users 25GB + $0.50/GB over. Artifactory storage: training images 50GB x20 =1TB ~$100/mo ECR.
How this hobby foundation model checklist works.
Each requirement below is something a hobby foundation model build typically needs. Pick one of the four researched options — recommended, free, cheaper or paid — add your own with "Other", or skip the requirement if your project doesn't need it. Nothing is mandatory; the plan on the right tracks what you've decided so nothing gets forgotten.
Your picks are saved in this browser automatically, so you can come back anytime. Options are researched per build level and refreshed as vendors change their plans — always verify details on the provider's page before committing.