<aside> 💡 I plan to expand this later, but as of my ~6th week with Colab Pro+ here is the TLDR:

</aside>

Personal Experience

• You can reliably get 2 v100s 24/7 on Pro+ for 50/mo starting after you receive your second bill
  • Fairly occasional freebie a100s that can be used for even more rigorous tasks like model training. I even started getting 2 at the same time my second month on pro+
• Colab makes it easy to save to Google Drive, and even create a shared output folder across multiple accounts, allowing you to save everything in the same place
• Colab Pro+ makes it easy to try other notebooks without having to worry about setup on something like Runpod/Vast

Price Breakdown (using 2 v100s as base)

Runpod/Vast prices taken as averages 7/28/21

Colab Pro+

0.06/hr

(if you run 24/7)

unrealistic you say? running 8hr/day:

0.21/hr

Vast

1.00/hr

Runpod

0.64/hr

Local*

New v100 costs ~4-8k. Say you get 2 used for 2k each, you still need to run them 24/7 for over 6 years before you reach price parity

*This does not include other computer parts, electricity, etc. Not a dig against running locally, I do it plenty, but if you’re buying a GPU at the level you need to run DD you should probably have additional use cases in mind.

Conclusion

It all comes down to your use case. Not everyone wants to be running near 24/7 like I tend to. But if you are planning on lengthy runtimes day in and day out, Colab Pro+ doesn’t deserve the bad rap it tends to get around the DD discord.