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Comment by freediver | Hacker News Reader

Good idea, but it's the first premium product that I've seen where the pitch is 'you may get certain features if you subscribe'. In another words there is no guarantee and a premium subscriber may still end up with same GPU as a free user. You may end up with a high-end V100 (not available to free) might be a better pitch.

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I mean, it's also 10$/month, you get what you pay for, and for most people this is enough. If you need more, you can get a dedicated GPU instance, but obviously that'll cost much more.

A fair use policy, which you seem to be referring to [1], is pretty standard fare for many 'invididual user' products to exclude heavy-use groups.

However, they could at least define expected and minimum capacity. They might omit it because the business in this – aside from capturing users in their ecosystem – is arbitraging wholesale GPU price against consumer monthly needs, along with scaling the free tier.

[1] "Why aren't resources guaranteed in Colab Pro?" on https://colab.research.google.com/signup

I would be happy with an explanation of "none of our service is guaranteed, but if we don't manage to give you your chosen GPU more than 80 percent of the time, you are free to cancel, and we will refund your final months subscription payment".

Since the subscription is monthly with no commitment, I think the viewpoint is probably something like "if it's not meeting your needs then unsubscribe." A refund of $10 is not going to be economically meaningful to folks who want to subscribe to this service. "Chosen GPU more than 80% of the time" sounds nice but it opens you up to adverse selection. They aren't looking for customers who want to pay ten bucks a month to rent 80% of a high performance GPU. That's not nearly enough money for that kind of commitment.

It would be economically meaningful to ML students.

The free version of Colab is pretty great for ML students.

They have a product with guarantees, but the market price for that is literally 100 times more than this one. If you want a certainty of getting the calculation unit of your choice and not getting kicked off of it, then that's not going to cost $10/month.

You should first check hourly instance pricing for GPU instances before making this complaint.

This is a very cheap price.

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