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Colab Pro

colab.research.google.com

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Re: Colab Pro

#71

Post by mattip »

iddan wrote: post #6

Colab is the best notebook I've ever used. It is a real game-changer and I can totally understand why people who use daily would pay for it.

It is however one of the prime examples of commercial use of open source software with no engagement of the community. colab notebooks may not run on a “vanilla” Jupyter installation because of google-only extensions to the protocol, and there has not yet been any effort on colab’s part to engage with the jupyter community. You may want to make sure your notebooks and research is not too tied in to one provider.

Re: Colab Pro

#72

Post by zelly »

hobofan wrote: post #69

I hate to be the boy who cries "Google will cancel this service", but this offering just seems strange. With a very low price point coupled with not that huge of a user base, this will end up making how much for Google? $1MM/month? $10MM/month? Either would be negligible for them.

Like others said, subscription products are very profitable. The target demographic for this has disposable income and would see this as an investment. A lot of people will sign up and never use it.

Don't forget that the alternative was just free. For all we know this is the way they're breaking even on Colab to prevent shutting it down.

Re: Colab Pro

#73

Post by zelly »

bitxbit wrote: post #8
iddan wrote: post #6

Colab is the best notebook I've ever used. It is a real game-changer and I can totally understand why people who use daily would pay for it.

We should really thank Mathematica for the notebook format.

It really makes more sense for actual math than Python deep learning. There isn't a lot of visualization and fancy symbols involved. The fascination with Jupyter notebooks is something I never got. You can't debug or make sense of the control flow like you can in a regular editor. Maybe it's a deep academia thing from all the researchers in this space.

Re: Colab Pro

#74

Post by sireat »

fibrennan wrote: post #59
m0zg wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After spending 5 minutes on the site, I could not figure out what an offering comparable to Colab Pro would cost me (i.e. single instance of a notebook hooked up to P100), and bailed. In contrast, Google puts pricing front and center, which makes me feel better about their value prop in spite of the fine print around limits and preemptibility.

Thanks for the feedback. Instance pricing is currently listed here ( https://gradient.paperspace.com/instances ) but we're working to make it simpler.

A small nitpick: the blurry background when hovering on Create really felt off.

I felt like my vision had just suddenly worsened and felt an urge to click away to a different card.

Re: Colab Pro

#75

Post by shoyer »

mattip wrote: post #71
iddan wrote: post #6

Colab is the best notebook I've ever used. It is a real game-changer and I can totally understand why people who use daily would pay for it.

It is however one of the prime examples of commercial use of open source software with no engagement of the community. colab notebooks may not run on a “vanilla” Jupyter installation because of google-only extensions to the protocol, and there has not yet been any effort on colab’s part to engage with the jupyter community. You may want to make sure your notebooks and research is not too tied in to one provider.

Colab uses real Jupyter notebooks. You can download and run them in Jupyter just fine, I do it all the time. There are a few proprietary extensions like forms (saved as comments in Python code) or colab only magics, but they’re totally optional and don’t break file format compatibility.

Re: Colab Pro

#76

Post by nestorD »

iddan wrote: post #6

Colab is the best notebook I've ever used. It is a real game-changer and I can totally understand why people who use daily would pay for it.

Their notebooks are indeed the best I ever used : so good that I use them for the interface and not the compute power.

I don't need more compute power or longer instances as I use collab with my own hardware (I have a good enough GPU and I don't risk being disconnected), what I need is the ability to run it fully locally with my python environement (+libs) and local data that never leaves my computer (making it effectively and alternative interface for python jupyter notebooks).

Re: Colab Pro

#77

Post by Tenoke »

hobofan wrote: post #69

I hate to be the boy who cries "Google will cancel this service", but this offering just seems strange. With a very low price point coupled with not that huge of a user base, this will end up making how much for Google? $1MM/month? $10MM/month? Either would be negligible for them.

Unlike most other products it won't matter as much here if they cancel it. It's hard to be too dependant on an in-browser stateless tool for prototyping.

You aren't going to be running service off it or even have a permanent set up so if they cancel it you'd have very little to transition from.

Re: Colab Pro

#78

Post by Tenoke »

zelly wrote: post #72
hobofan wrote: post #69

I hate to be the boy who cries "Google will cancel this service", but this offering just seems strange. With a very low price point coupled with not that huge of a user base, this will end up making how much for Google? $1MM/month? $10MM/month? Either would be negligible for them.

Like others said, subscription products are very profitable. The target demographic for this has disposable income and would see this as an investment. A lot of people will sign up and never use it. Don't forget that the alternative was just free. For all we know this is the way they're breaking even on Colab to prevent shutting it down.

Why would people signup and never use it? I'd expect most of those people to just use the free Colab.

Re: Colab Pro

#79

Post by arnaudsm »

fibrennan wrote: post #59
m0zg wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After spending 5 minutes on the site, I could not figure out what an offering comparable to Colab Pro would cost me (i.e. single instance of a notebook hooked up to P100), and bailed. In contrast, Google puts pricing front and center, which makes me feel better about their value prop in spite of the fine print around limits and preemptibility.

Thanks for the feedback. Instance pricing is currently listed here ( https://gradient.paperspace.com/instances ) but we're working to make it simpler.

Really interesting product, but please disable the notification sound of your chatbot!

Re: Colab Pro

#80

Post by dannyw »

fibrennan wrote: post #29

Just wanted to share a Colab alternative I work on called Gradient[0] (also includes a free GPU). Some of the key differences: - Faster storage. Colab uses Google Drive which is convenient to use but very slow. For example, training datasets often contain a large amount of small files (eg 50k images in the sample TensorFlow and PyTorch datasets). Colab will start to crawl when it tries to ingest these files which is…

I found Gradient and Paperspace pricing to be incredibly opaque, and even a bit deceptive.

First of all, Colab works on a "resources are free, just not guaranteed" model. When I was about to sign up for Developer, with "Free + Low-Mid Instance Types", I expected that I would have reasonable, shared access to low-mid instances as part of my subscription.

(otherwise.. what am I paying for? Don't charge me... to charge me.)

I then found out that you have to pay a per hourly cost for low-mid instance types; making it a better buy to just use AWS and GCP directly yourself. (When you suspend instances on GCP, you don't get billed for CPU or GPU hours; just storage).

And finally, after that, I found out I had to separately for storage, as well as a $5 deposit minimum or something like that! Colab doesn't have anything like this. AWS doesn't bill a minimum of $5 for each instance, even if you spin it down after a few minutes.

And finally, I couldn't even use the instances I thought I'd get access to, because you're out of availability. Which is really questionable: I'm paying per-hour rates, on top of a SaaS monthly subscription, and plus storage costs with minimum floors (probably a high margin item for you); for a very constrained capacity of GPUs?

We overpay for AWS, and GCP (their margins are insane! esp on bandwidth) because they guarantee most people availability. If I want to deploy 3 gigantic instances for a few hours, (and I have the right quota limits); I can. Sure I'm paying a lot more than what I should, but it's like taxi drivers: you're not just paying for the cabbies time as he drives you, but also his idle time as he looks for a customer.

I don't understand what I am paying for here. I feel like I'm just being charged margin for you to wrap around GCP or AWS with a colorful UI. I do not feel comfortable with you having my credit card details.

If you made a subscription, around $20 per month maybe, that gave me reasonable access to a mid-tier GPU instance subject to capacity at no marginal cost, I would happily subscribe.

Until then, I'm going with Colab, because the beauty is that your costs are fixed and not marginal.

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