Factory.ai ("Droids") sells "ticket to mergeable PR" automation across the SDLC to large enterprises, including NVIDIA, Adobe, Morgan Stanley, and EY. It is the closest funded competitor to Modulo on outcome: both platforms run specialized agents through a governed pipeline rather than shipping a single generalist coding assistant. The difference is in how each platform prices governance and where self-hosting sits in the product.

Factory's tiers, read in full

Factory's published pricing (factory.ai/pricing) runs five tiers. Pro is $20/user/month, Plus is $100/user/month, Max is $200/user/month - Plus gives roughly 5x Pro's usage allowance, Max roughly 10x. None of the three includes SSO, SAML/SCIM, audit logging, or admin controls. Teams sits alongside them at $60/month per team plus $40/month per seat, hard-capped at 10 seats, "everything in Pro" - still no governance.

Governance starts at Business, a custom-quoted tier (contact sales, up to 150 seats) that adds SSO, SAML/SCIM, Zero Data Retention, audit logging, and basic admin controls: model selection, autonomy level, model access deny lists, network policy. Enterprise, also custom-quoted with unlimited seats, adds dedicated compute, on-premise deployment, sub-organizations, full admin controls, customer-managed encryption keys, data residency, and a dedicated account manager.

No official price for Business or Enterprise has ever been published or leaked - we checked review sites, Reddit, and Hacker News. One third-party aggregator (saastruecost.com, an unverified source rather than an official Factory quote) estimates Enterprise "starts from" roughly $2,000/month, or about $24,000/year.

The tier-matching trap

A buyer comparing Factory's $20/month headline against Modulo's flat annual fee is comparing the wrong tiers. Factory's governance features - the ones a buyer actually needs to run agents against production code with any confidence - do not exist at any seat count or price point below Business. To get what Modulo's Team plan includes by default, a buyer has to reach a tier with no public number at all.

Modulo's Team plan is $8,000/year flat, per organization, unlimited seats, self-served with an offline signed license key. We were founding-priced at $4,000/year pre-GA; at $8,000/year, the comparison is against a Factory tier with no published price to compare it to.

The pricing shape, independent of the hidden number

Even before governance enters the comparison, Factory's tiers are usage-metered: Plus and Max are literally usage multipliers over Pro, not new capabilities. The more an engineering team relies on Factory's droids, the more the bill grows, seat by seat and token by token.

Modulo's flat annual fee runs the other way. Unlimited seats and no per-seat billing mean heavier usage inside the org is free upside, not a line item that grows with adoption.

Self-hosting is a posture

Factory does offer on-premise deployment (see our multi-platform comparison for the corrected read on this). It exists only behind a custom-quoted Enterprise sales conversation, never self-serve, never at a published price, and even then it ships a closed-source binary rather than inspectable source. Factory is also largely model-agnostic - it works with OpenAI-compatible endpoints and does not lock a customer to a proprietary model, so model lock-in is a smaller factor here than the pricing gate.

The difference is posture. Modulo is self-hosted by construction: there is no hosted multi-tenant product to reach in the first place, so every deployment runs on the customer's own infrastructure from the start. Modulo's source is also publicly readable under the Business Source License - source-available. BUSL restricts hosting Modulo as a competing SaaS product; it does not restrict reading, self-hosting, or modifying the code for your own use. Both come with the one paid tier at a published price.

The principle behind this: self-hosted, no telemetry means your data never leaves your infrastructure, and humans in the loop where it matters means automation never gets a blank check regardless of which tier you're on.

Capitalization, for context

Factory has raised roughly $220 million across three rounds in about a year: a $50 million raise at a $300 million valuation in September 2025, a $150 million Series C at $1.5 billion in April 2026, and reportedly a $60 million round pending at approximately $3.5 billion in August 2026. No public revenue or ARR figure has ever been disclosed. Factory is well-capitalized and growing fast - that much is verifiable. Whether the business is profitable is not public information, and we make no claim either way.

Where the two actually differ

Factory and Modulo converge on architecture - both run governed, model-agnostic agent pipelines, and both now offer some form of self-hosting. They diverge on pricing shape and access: Modulo's governance is included in the one paid tier at a flat, published annual price; Factory's governance and self-hosting both require custom Enterprise sales with no public number. If your evaluation stops at Factory's $20/month headline, it is pricing the wrong tier.