[ccarpenterg]

I've been using Colab for over a year now. I train deep learning models on NLP and medical imaging datasets.

It's a great tool and it lets you focus on the code and the models, instead of the hardware and OS. But $9.99/month is a little expensive for my taste.

You can't customize it and if they change something you have to install software by hand sometimes. It should be $1.99/month, that's the kind of price I'd pay for this basic cloud computing service.

edit: I use Colab to play with ML models. I really don't think it's possible, for instance, to train a model on Imagenet using Colab. So Colab is similar to the microwave, if you want to cook a serious recipe you should use a real kitchen.

[lewis1028282]

I mean when modern GPUs are $1000 I'm curious how you think $9.99 is too much.

[m0zg]

Not to disagree, but P100 is not a "modern" GPU. It's based on Pascal, so it's a couple of generations behind. Throughput-wise it's roughly equivalent to 1080ti. Which is still something like $600, so your point stands.

[lupire]

Plus the supporting hardware to run and cool it.

[mistrial9]

in medical research you are saying $10 / month is too much.. this might be a study in consumer psychology! Here in California, biotech secretaries drive a mercedes...

[eru]

A big Mercedes, but share three people to a bedroom.

[bhl]

Curious to how you've been training with Colab. I tried running 50 epochs on a UNet3D model, each taking about 20 minutes to run; it was a pain in the ass because the session kept disconnecting.