I deeply appreciate Colab. I bought a nice home GPU rig a few years ago, but seldom use it. When I am lightly using Colab I use it for free and when I have more time for personal research the $10/month plan works really well. I can see occasionally paying for the $50/month plan as the need arises in the future.

I am working on an AI book in Python. (I usually write about Lisp languages.) About half the examples will be Colab notebooks and half will be Python examples to be run on laptops.

In any case, I like the soon to be implemented changes, sounds like a good idea to get credits and see a readout of usage and what you have left.