This is horrible if true. Usually they announce such changes ahead of time. Seeing your post I rushed to check the current prices but I see no changes at least in the US. I wanna say this is some sort of error.

Okay that calms me down a bit, good to hear that it is not happening in the US. Perhaps it is only EU? Or hopefully an error as you say.

433 EUR for 500 compute units seems beyond excessive.

Very likely a translation error

Austria. For me it's 11.1 Eur for 100, 50.7 for 500

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It seems to make more sense if they mean DKK rather than euro

There must be some mistake. Why would they raise the price that much? They instantly drive away all their customers. 95 Euro a month? Lol

Think about what you are suggesting!

Italy, 11.28€ pro and 51.54€ pro+

Must be an error, its illegal for google to do this in the eu, without notice etc.

It was an error. They icreased it but to 11.56 and 52.81 euro for Pro and Pro+

Same for Germany

Same Slovakia

> They instantly drive away all their customers.

(Possibly) Not the ones they want to target, big businesses.

Others are saying it's an error.

Collab is a lot of free GPU time being given away and it's getting increasingly used to run AI for open source hobby stuff like stable diffusion and koboldAI. I do not expect that it's sustainable.

seems they confused DKK and € symbols.

That's a good point, but still, an order of magnitude increase? If they were going to raise prices they would telegraph ahead of time and the increase would be reasonable. I guess we will see if it turns out to be true or not.

Bit offtopic but is there any reason to use Google Collab over Paperspace? Isn’t paperspace cheaper?

11.10€/mo for pro here
50.70€/mo for pro+

EU obv

Is KoboldAI best in class for open source conversation engines? I’ve been meaning to try one of those out.

I just checked and mine says 9 euros a month.

I haven't seen any evidence that they changed the price. It's still $10/month for me.

You can check for yourself right here: https://colab.research.google.com/signup

The thing is at ~$100/month, there are better and cheaper alternatives that give more option so it is hard to believe this is not an error.

Hi, I was thinking of moving to paperspace. How much storage does it provide? Anyway to mount Google drive with it?

KoboldAI is a way to run whatever engines you can throw into it. It's more a UX layer than any specific AI.

That said, it has the best ones I'm aware of.

Mine is still $9.99/mo. Guess I can put my pitchfork away.

It's an error. They've obviously listed the price in Danish Kroner, but with a euro sign by mistake. That didn't occur to you? The actual price in euros if you convert it from Kroner is about €12.73 for Pro and €58.16 for Pro+. Maybe you want to delete this post.

In Indian, the prices remain the same as the previous listed prices.

Just checked, my US prices are the same.

[edit] This is fixed now. The prices shown in DK were incorrect, but afaict all users were charged correct amounts. If I'm wrong and someone was charged incorrectly, they can reach out at colab-billing@google.com

Hi, I lead product for Colab. Thanks for flagging. This is clearly a mistake and we're looking into how it slipped through our testing.

We'll get this fixed asap and proactively issue refunds to anyone impacted. We haven't changed prices for Colab Pro.

Sorry about this. If you hit weird things in the future, I'm @thechrisperry on twitter (I check that a little more religiously than reddit where I mostly lurk).

This was a mistake, and only impacted DK.

This was a mistake and only impacted DK

This was a bug. Sorry. Fixing asap.

This was a mistake that only impacted DK yes

Per our terms of service we must give 30 days notice before price changes. This was a mistake and we're fixing ASAP. We'll refund all impacted.

[edit to reflect tax inclusivity] one thing to mention is we recently updated Colab advertised pricing to be tax inclusive in the EU, so our advertised pricing did increase to reflect taxes; it should not have changed actual prices paid.

We made an update to make our advertised prices in the EU to reflect tax inclusive (standard EU practice). This did not change actual prices paid, you were still paying taxes before.

Paperspace, lads. Paperspace is where it’s at. except for the storage limitations, my experience there is so much better than colab

Storage depends on your plan, but any overage is .02 usd per gb/month and the max is 10 TB.

Drive mounting isn’t exactly there, but you can pull any file with wkentaro’s gdown easily enough.

That’s why I don’t Google. I wouldn’t give him the time of day.

wow nice finding

Thank you very much for the response, will edit the post to be less alarmist. Would also like to just say thank you for making a great platform for data science collaboration, and also for finally bringing pro to scandinavia :D it is a great value product and im very happy to pay 9 euro for it, but 94 would definitely have been too much.

lol please do complain very loudly if we 10x your prices! and thank you!!

in this case it appears only the messaging was affected, and nobody was charged the 94 euros thankfully. I'll update when we get our page fixed. thanks again!

unrelated to OP: what is the "best practice" method for a notebook to self-test if it's running in a colab environment? i think the method I'm currently using is something like

probably_colab = False
try:
    import google.colab
    probably_colab = True
except ImportError:
    pass

which I'm not a fan of for a variety of reasons. what would you recommend?

> Hi, I lead product for Colab.

Thanks for your responses here!

And thank google's management chain above you for allowing you to represent the product here.

Your comments here just saved a number of subscriptions that would have otherwise canceled.

Oh nice. Please can you get invoice based billing set up so I can have my university pay for my students' Colab subscription!

Ah yes, several EU countries started sending warning shots about it. Makes sense. Good luck for the production fix on friday evening!

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[edit] I give up on formatting

We've never really worked on a foilproof way to detect if you're using Colab, but this might work a little better for you:

import sys probably_colab = False

if 'google.colab' in sys.modules: probably_colab = True

hey now no need to be snarky

👍🏻 thanks

I was so close to getting this and then our partner team got hit by layoffs which set us back. Hoping before next school year to have something (not perfect), but we'll see.

Thanks! Though a lot of thanks to my buddy in Google Brain who saw this thread and pinged me this morning :)

I have been using colab for ML training big models. It is a good product. Would love a more straightforward integration with my proper python modules. I end up having to update my libraries on my local, pushing to gh, then refresh/restart the colab kernel. Would love a better way to run my python module in -e mode. Thanks.

I use Colab because of its easy integration to Google Drive. What do you use for storage on Paperspace? I don’t want to pay another service (S3) for storage.

Maybe a little easier:

import sys
probably_colab = 'google.colab' in sys.modules

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Preconfigured environment has a cost, learn Linux and do it your self.

It’s 29 cents a gig per month over the storage limit, and i rarely go over the storage limit if i am carefully managing files. Definitely the biggest drawback though. You can always just use wkentaro’s gdrive package to pull from google drive as well

Availability in GPU is terrible in paper space. I would rather get colab for that and a VM for heavy loads. I got a refund when it took me a day to find a GPU. I don't have time to watch 24/7 for a GPU that is snagged in seconds. This was in the payed option.

Availability in GPU is terrible. Colab is better because you don't have to wait for a GPU that is usually snagged in seconds.

Bonus for the bug report? Think of all the effort and adrenaline that went into this.

It is best to use a script in order to get a Paperspace notebook. Otherwise, yeah, you are going to have a hard time sometimes. The availability does depend on the timezone from what I've heard.

The fact I have to use a script proves my point. I shouldn't be needing a script.

Good to hear, thanks. That's when I'm teaching next so would be great. It's a fantastic resource for teaching ML but frustrating when students hit the GPU cap. My university also won't let the students pay for Colab Pro on their .edu google account themselves, some legal nonsense. Some of them end up paying on their personal google accounts but then it's awkward needing to share the notebooks again (and I feel bad about the students paying when it should really be the school).