You can get almost unlimited GPU time on Google Colab for $50 a month. I don't know why or how they pay for this, but it does bring "real research" into the reach of individuals.
You can get more processing power and true unlimited time with any semi-competent graphic card (probably costing less than 1 year of Colab Pro+). Pro+ is a scam, you are not told what kind of instances you will be running at, and you dont have any guaranteed continuous running time. And even if you were given full 24/7 access to a top of the line card that would be like 0.001% of the power used to train any big modern ML model.
Users complain all the time: https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleColab/comments/sq0lia/colab_p...