Case Study: Substack speeds up ML development and deployment with Modal

Why Substack moved their AI and ML pipelines to Modal

Substack, a popular online newsletter platform, moved their AI and ML pipelines from AWS SageMaker to Modal. Their previous setup was slow and convoluted, making it difficult for developers to iterate quickly. Engineers faced a poor developer experience, collaboration challenges, and long container startup times that impeded their workflow.

By implementing Modal, Substack was able to run model training and deployment with much greater speed and flexibility. The solution allowed a new recommendation model to be spun up in days instead of weeks. Modal’s platform made the development process feel more natural and eliminated the long waits associated with their previous vendor, significantly speeding up their developer iteration cycles.

Substack

Mike Cohen

Data Manager