Google Colab Pro is switching to compute credits

I've explored Colab users as a target audience for our product, especially given the fact that practically all the posts on the GoogleColab subreddit complain about how bad it is. Even those with the Pro+ or Pro tend to revert to the free Colab offer because there's no transparency.

What I understood from my interactions is that they complain but will not use a paid product because even though they're paying from nothing to $49, the actual resources used is in the $800/month ballpark (notebooks running 23 hours per day, seven days a week, using a GPU).

These are clearly hobbyists. The pros had different problems such as not being able to pay for it from certain countries.

In other words, there are people who need a notebook to run and not crash and willing to pay for that and there are others working on toy projects/individual pet projects or projects with no real stakes who'll complain about it but will not switch because another company will not really subsidize usage.

Yes, there are other companies that offer notebooks, but our product was for professionals in the ML field, and there's much more to ML project than running a notebook (real time collaborative notebooks, automatic experiment tracking, plugging compute from any cloud provider, one click model deployment, object storage like a filesystem, live monitoring dashboard for deployed models, and more).

Question for the Colab team:

The restrictions listed at https://research.google.com/colaboratory/tos_v3.html differ slightly from the limits listed at https://research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html specifically tos_v3.html does not mention these items from the faq

    * using a remote desktop or SSH
    * connecting to remote proxies

I can appreciate why those were added - I've read posts and notebooks explaining how you can use ngrok or cloudflare to do those things in violation of the restrictions in the faq and clearly many people aren't using Colab as intended.

Speaking as someone who has been playing around with the Colab free tier with the expectation of moving to a paid service once I know what I'm really doing, I'd like to know if it's likely these restrictions will be eased a bit with the move to a compute credit system.

I'm still learning and haven't had a need to do those things yet but I believe remote ssh access would greatly simplify managing things. The Jupyter interface and integrated Colab debugger are good for experimenting but I'm worried that as I get closer to production I'll need a way to observe and change the state of long-running Colab processes the way I could with ssh, ansible or other existing tooling.

Clearly I can build that myself or use something like Anvil Works https://anvil.works but that's time and effort I'd rather avoid if possible. So I'm hoping that the Colab team will ease the SSH restriction for people like me who want to use it for more traditional ops/monitoring of long running tasks.

Do you anticipate any change or easing of the SSH restriction?

It's a fair critique and one we have discussed. With this change we are extending the lifetime of the units to three months to give users more flexibility. This is a net user improvement, today if you pay for a subscription any "unused" quota disappears after a month.

I aspire to offer that level of transparency. I am foiled by (1) GPU prices can change randomly on me, and (2) it's hard to convey to a user pricing without giving them a huge incomprehensible price sheet.

All is not lost though, I've got a few irons in the fire that should help resolve those points of feedback over the coming year.

In the meantime, you can always just buy a GCP VM and you have all the certainty you want: https://research.google.com/colaboratory/marketplace.html I find most people don't want that because it's a pain that Colab Pro/Pro+ largely abstracts.

I do not anticipate changes in the short term, but I am always open to changes in the medium term.

Both of those address angles of abuse that I don't want to discuss in big forums, and go counter to interactive notebook compute, our top priority.