[N] Google is increasing the price of every Colab Pro tier by 10X! Pro is 95 Euro and Pro+ is 433 Euro per month! Without notifying users!

Submitted by FreePenalties t3_114hphp in MachineLearning

(Edit: This is definitely an error, not a change in pricing model, so no need for alarm. This has been confirmed by the lead product owner of colab)

Without any announcement (that i could find) google has increased the pricing per month of all its Colab Pro tiers, Pro is now 95 Euro and Pro+ is 433 Euro. I paid 9.99 Euro for the Pro tier last month... and all source i can find also refer to the 9.99 pricing as late as September last year. I have also checked that this is not a "per year" subscription price, it is in fact per month.

I looked at the VM that Colab Pro gives me and did the calculation for a similar VM in google cloud (4 vCPUs, 15GB RAM and a T4 GPU) running 24/7 for a month (Google calculates it as 730 hours).

It costs around 290 Euro, less than the Colab Pro+ subscription...

The 100 credits gotten from the Colab Pro subscription would only last around 50 hours on the same machine!

And the 500 credits from Colab Pro+ would get 250 hours on that machine, a third of the time you get from using Google Cloud, at over 100 euro more....

This is a blatant ripoff, and i will certainly cancel my subscription right now if they don't change it back. It should be said that i do not know if this is also happening in other regions, but i just wanted to warn my fellow machine learning peeps before you unknowingly burn 100 bucks on a service that used to cost 10...

Google Colabs price tiers on 17th of February 2023, 10 times what they were in January 2023.

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ckperry t1_j8xfzm2 wrote

[edit] This is fixed now. The prices shown in DK were incorrect, but afaict all users were charged correct amounts. If I'm wrong and someone was charged incorrectly, they can reach out at colab-billing@google.com

Hi, I lead product for Colab. Thanks for flagging. This is clearly a mistake and we're looking into how it slipped through our testing.

We'll get this fixed asap and proactively issue refunds to anyone impacted. We haven't changed prices for Colab Pro.

Sorry about this. If you hit weird things in the future, I'm @thechrisperry on twitter (I check that a little more religiously than reddit where I mostly lurk).

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FreePenalties OP t1_j8xrm5m wrote

Thank you very much for the response, will edit the post to be less alarmist. Would also like to just say thank you for making a great platform for data science collaboration, and also for finally bringing pro to scandinavia :D it is a great value product and im very happy to pay 9 euro for it, but 94 would definitely have been too much.

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ckperry t1_j8xtufq wrote

lol please do complain very loudly if we 10x your prices! and thank you!!

in this case it appears only the messaging was affected, and nobody was charged the 94 euros thankfully. I'll update when we get our page fixed. thanks again!

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Appropriate_Ant_4629 t1_j8y3koe wrote

> Hi, I lead product for Colab.

Thanks for your responses here!

And thank google's management chain above you for allowing you to represent the product here.

Your comments here just saved a number of subscriptions that would have otherwise canceled.

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ckperry t1_j8yhh4f wrote

Thanks! Though a lot of thanks to my buddy in Google Brain who saw this thread and pinged me this morning :)

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DigThatData t1_j8xxnpp wrote

unrelated to OP: what is the "best practice" method for a notebook to self-test if it's running in a colab environment? i think the method I'm currently using is something like

probably_colab = False
try:
    import google.colab
    probably_colab = True
except ImportError:
    pass

which I'm not a fan of for a variety of reasons. what would you recommend?

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ckperry t1_j8ygjep wrote

[edit] I give up on formatting

We've never really worked on a foilproof way to detect if you're using Colab, but this might work a little better for you:

import sys probably_colab = False

if 'google.colab' in sys.modules: probably_colab = True

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Captain_Cowboy t1_j8z1lv4 wrote

Maybe a little easier:

import sys
probably_colab = 'google.colab' in sys.modules
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daking999 t1_j8yao4j wrote

Oh nice. Please can you get invoice based billing set up so I can have my university pay for my students' Colab subscription!

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ckperry t1_j8ygy9m wrote

I was so close to getting this and then our partner team got hit by layoffs which set us back. Hoping before next school year to have something (not perfect), but we'll see.

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daking999 t1_j91mtko wrote

Good to hear, thanks. That's when I'm teaching next so would be great. It's a fantastic resource for teaching ML but frustrating when students hit the GPU cap. My university also won't let the students pay for Colab Pro on their .edu google account themselves, some legal nonsense. Some of them end up paying on their personal google accounts but then it's awkward needing to share the notebooks again (and I feel bad about the students paying when it should really be the school).

1

ach224 t1_j8ywbup wrote

I have been using colab for ML training big models. It is a good product. Would love a more straightforward integration with my proper python modules. I end up having to update my libraries on my local, pushing to gh, then refresh/restart the colab kernel. Would love a better way to run my python module in -e mode. Thanks.

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phobrain t1_j904xfl wrote

Bonus for the bug report? Think of all the effort and adrenaline that went into this.

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rafaelcm33 t1_j8wgn5w wrote

It was an error. They icreased it but to 11.56 and 52.81 euro for Pro and Pro+

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ckperry t1_j8xhmdx wrote

We made an update to make our advertised prices in the EU to reflect tax inclusive (standard EU practice). This did not change actual prices paid, you were still paying taxes before.

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keepthepace t1_j8ycv83 wrote

Ah yes, several EU countries started sending warning shots about it. Makes sense. Good luck for the production fix on friday evening!

5

No_Dust_9578 t1_j8w59ny wrote

This is horrible if true. Usually they announce such changes ahead of time. Seeing your post I rushed to check the current prices but I see no changes at least in the US. I wanna say this is some sort of error.

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FreePenalties OP t1_j8w6gz5 wrote

Okay that calms me down a bit, good to hear that it is not happening in the US. Perhaps it is only EU? Or hopefully an error as you say.

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Ronny_Jotten t1_j8x62do wrote

It's an error. They've obviously listed the price in Danish Kroner, but with a euro sign by mistake. That didn't occur to you? The actual price in euros if you convert it from Kroner is about €12.73 for Pro and €58.16 for Pro+. Maybe you want to delete this post.

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ckperry t1_j8xgy80 wrote

This was a mistake that only impacted DK yes

3

No_Dust_9578 t1_j8w6ttf wrote

433 EUR for 500 compute units seems beyond excessive.

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ckperry t1_j8xh0sg wrote

Per our terms of service we must give 30 days notice before price changes. This was a mistake and we're fixing ASAP. We'll refund all impacted.

[edit to reflect tax inclusivity] one thing to mention is we recently updated Colab advertised pricing to be tax inclusive in the EU, so our advertised pricing did increase to reflect taxes; it should not have changed actual prices paid.

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FHIR_HL7_Integrator t1_j8wdsru wrote

There must be some mistake. Why would they raise the price that much? They instantly drive away all their customers. 95 Euro a month? Lol

Think about what you are suggesting!

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Tripanes t1_j8whvpo wrote

> They instantly drive away all their customers.

(Possibly) Not the ones they want to target, big businesses.

Others are saying it's an error.

Collab is a lot of free GPU time being given away and it's getting increasingly used to run AI for open source hobby stuff like stable diffusion and koboldAI. I do not expect that it's sustainable.

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FHIR_HL7_Integrator t1_j8wk38a wrote

That's a good point, but still, an order of magnitude increase? If they were going to raise prices they would telegraph ahead of time and the increase would be reasonable. I guess we will see if it turns out to be true or not.

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pennomi t1_j8wpqxp wrote

Is KoboldAI best in class for open source conversation engines? I’ve been meaning to try one of those out.

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Tripanes t1_j8x108o wrote

KoboldAI is a way to run whatever engines you can throw into it. It's more a UX layer than any specific AI.

That said, it has the best ones I'm aware of.

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amhotw t1_j8wuwao wrote

The thing is at ~$100/month, there are better and cheaper alternatives that give more option so it is hard to believe this is not an error.

2

ckperry t1_j8xgvnp wrote

This was a bug. Sorry. Fixing asap.

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AlmightySnoo t1_j8w9cof wrote

Very likely a translation error

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bananskaftet t1_j8wcz08 wrote

It seems to make more sense if they mean DKK rather than euro

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ckperry t1_j8xgt75 wrote

This was a mistake, and only impacted DK.

2

Ulfgardleo t1_j8wig60 wrote

seems they confused DKK and € symbols.

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ckperry t1_j8xgugf wrote

This was a mistake and only impacted DK

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Tyson1405 t1_j8wnme0 wrote

Bit offtopic but is there any reason to use Google Collab over Paperspace? Isn’t paperspace cheaper?

7

Sid_b23692 t1_j8wxw0o wrote

Hi, I was thinking of moving to paperspace. How much storage does it provide? Anyway to mount Google drive with it?

2

athos45678 t1_j8xjcfb wrote

Storage depends on your plan, but any overage is .02 usd per gb/month and the max is 10 TB.

Drive mounting isn’t exactly there, but you can pull any file with wkentaro’s gdown easily enough.

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I_will_delete_myself t1_j8zvipt wrote

Availability in GPU is terrible in paper space. I would rather get colab for that and a VM for heavy loads. I got a refund when it took me a day to find a GPU. I don't have time to watch 24/7 for a GPU that is snagged in seconds. This was in the payed option.

1

clauwen t1_j8we2xt wrote

Must be an error, its illegal for google to do this in the eu, without notice etc.

5

DoctorFuu t1_j8wo7rj wrote

11.10€/mo for pro here
50.70€/mo for pro+

EU obv

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JiraSuxx2 t1_j8wqnr5 wrote

I just checked and mine says 9 euros a month.

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athos45678 t1_j8xj0gi wrote

Paperspace, lads. Paperspace is where it’s at. except for the storage limitations, my experience there is so much better than colab

2

kau_mad t1_j8yy3yy wrote

I use Colab because of its easy integration to Google Drive. What do you use for storage on Paperspace? I don’t want to pay another service (S3) for storage.

1

athos45678 t1_j8zewjb wrote

It’s 29 cents a gig per month over the storage limit, and i rarely go over the storage limit if i am carefully managing files. Definitely the biggest drawback though. You can always just use wkentaro’s gdrive package to pull from google drive as well

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I_will_delete_myself t1_j8zvrrv wrote

Availability in GPU is terrible. Colab is better because you don't have to wait for a GPU that is usually snagged in seconds.

1

abstractcontrol t1_j915epu wrote

It is best to use a script in order to get a Paperspace notebook. Otherwise, yeah, you are going to have a hard time sometimes. The availability does depend on the timezone from what I've heard.

2

TenaciousDwight t1_j8x1o3r wrote

Mine is still $9.99/mo. Guess I can put my pitchfork away.

1

Wild_Basil_2396 t1_j8x8bdf wrote

In Indian, the prices remain the same as the previous listed prices.

1

Electronic_Medicine7 t1_j8xm8fp wrote

That’s why I don’t Google. I wouldn’t give him the time of day.

1

danielfm123 t1_j8zb3m1 wrote

Preconfigured environment has a cost, learn Linux and do it your self.

1