First of all, Colab works on a "resources are free, just not guaranteed" model. When I was about to sign up for Developer, with "Free + Low-Mid Instance Types", I expected that I would have reasonable, shared access to low-mid instances as part of my subscription.
(otherwise.. what am I paying for? Don't charge me... to charge me.)
I then found out that you have to pay a per hourly cost for low-mid instance types; making it a better buy to just use AWS and GCP directly yourself. (When you suspend instances on GCP, you don't get billed for CPU or GPU hours; just storage).
And finally, after that, I found out I had to separately for storage, as well as a $5 deposit minimum or something like that! Colab doesn't have anything like this. AWS doesn't bill a minimum of $5 for each instance, even if you spin it down after a few minutes.
And finally, I couldn't even use the instances I thought I'd get access to, because you're out of availability. Which is really questionable: I'm paying per-hour rates, on top of a SaaS monthly subscription, and plus storage costs with minimum floors (probably a high margin item for you); for a very constrained capacity of GPUs?
We overpay for AWS, and GCP (their margins are insane! esp on bandwidth) because they guarantee most people availability. If I want to deploy 3 gigantic instances for a few hours, (and I have the right quota limits); I can. Sure I'm paying a lot more than what I should, but it's like taxi drivers: you're not just paying for the cabbies time as he drives you, but also his idle time as he looks for a customer.
I don't understand what I am paying for here. I feel like I'm just being charged margin for you to wrap around GCP or AWS with a colorful UI. I do not feel comfortable with you having my credit card details.
If you made a subscription, around $20 per month maybe, that gave me reasonable access to a mid-tier GPU instance subject to capacity at no marginal cost, I would happily subscribe.
Until then, I'm going with Colab, because the beauty is that your costs are fixed and not marginal.