I liked the flat fees of Colab Pro and Pro+. Maybe this new system is even cheaper for me, but there's something psychological about having to pay for credits instead of a flat fee that I don't like. I've heard Paperspace is good but the storage is expensive. What cheap/free alternatives are there?

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i-heart-turtles t1_isozegx wrote on October 17, 2022 at 4:58 PM

I'm not a google fanboy or anything, but I was under the impression that the colab compute units was basically how colab operated before via gcp, it was just hidden from the user... now the system just shows you explicitly your quota. I personally appreciate more being told exactly how much compute I have left in my bucket so I can manage more carefully and be less wasteful.

Anyways I like the colab frontend a lot & integration with google drive more then the other offerings I tried, but it's just my opinion.

neuroguy123 t1_ispbbs0 wrote on October 17, 2022 at 6:18 PM

I have been a long time user of Colab Pro+ and that might be true, but I have noticed a significant difference in the quality of GPU I get now. You can specify a 'premium' GPU now vs standard. I can get an A100-40Gb any time I want right now, whereas before that was rare. For 100 credits you can train for about 6.5 hours on that. Anyway, I think you're right that they just give you more transparency, but you also get more choice in how aggressively you want to spend the credits. I suspect that the A100s are more available now after these changes.

When I want to use Colab, what I do now is develop on my desktop machine until I have everything working properly and then just train as needed on Colab when I need more compute.

Jean-Porte t1_isnmigh wrote on October 17, 2022 at 9:55 AM

Have a flat usage

glenn-jocher t1_isokwu9 wrote on October 17, 2022 at 3:15 PM

Kaggle?

EmbarrassedHelp t1_isp0hol wrote on October 17, 2022 at 5:06 PM

Kaggle's free tier seems to give more GPU time than Colab Pro right now

MisterGulaman t1_isolgoz wrote on October 17, 2022 at 3:19 PM

Vast.ai works for me

SrPicadillo2 t1_isqeboy wrote on October 17, 2022 at 10:40 PM

Paid Colab is not available in my country so I had to learn how to use DataBricks

r_linux_mod_isahoe t1_ism3y0q wrote on October 17, 2022 at 12:23 AM

easy. freetpu.com

I mean, why would you expect high tier hardware to be provided for free, seriously?

grandphuba t1_ismz1rf wrote on October 17, 2022 at 4:39 AM

why are you being downvoted your take is very much reasonable

sambiak t1_isn3w05 wrote on October 17, 2022 at 5:33 AM

Because OP is ok with paying for a TPU he just wants a flat fee per month.

Competitive-Rub-1958 t1_isorvsw wrote on October 17, 2022 at 4:05 PM

Get the Pro subscription then? that's a flat fee

[deleted] t1_isotjyq wrote on October 17, 2022 at 4:17 PM

[deleted]

mudits02 t1_ispvruj wrote on October 17, 2022 at 8:31 PM

Don't understand why your comment has so many down votes. Although it's logical that you won't get top notch performance with a free plan