Google Colab (paid tiers)
Sibling records disagree:
- identity_kind:
compute/google-colabsays email, compute/google-colab-paid says card - verdict:
compute/google-colabsays qualifies-with-caveat, compute/google-colab-paid says fails-quota
- Free allowance
- No published quota on any tier: Colab states its limits vary and are not published, and paid tiers fall back to the free policies when compute units are exhausted
- Verdict
- fails: quotathe free allowance is too small to matter
- Cost
- USD 19.91/monthparsed from the record, in USD
- Identity
- cardcard required, no phone
- Binding limit
- request-ratecompute units are a separate currency and their consumption is not published
- Evidence
- documented7 sources; a first-party page was read and the sentence quoted
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-12-04checked 2026-11-03 (live); stale on 2026-12-04
| Free tier | no published quota on any tier: Colab states its limits vary and are not published, and paid tiers fall back to the free policies when compute units are exhausted unit none; metered on wall-clock; a paid tier whose limits are unpublished cannot be budgeted; the GPU and TPU types are not named and vary over time, GPU access on the free tier is heavily restricted, and a free-tier notebook runs at most 12 hours depending on availability |
|---|---|
| Price | none stated |
| Limits |
a documented absence of limits is a discretionary throttle, not a quota, and it does not become one when paid for |
| Binding | request-rate the compute-unit allowance binds and the policies behind it are unpublished, so there is no ceiling to schedule against |
| Identity | card a paid tier requires a payment, and the paid offerings are only available in the countries that the pricing page lists (the list starts: United States of America, Canada, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Japan) |
| Egress | not published |
| Retention | a VM is deleted when idle and has a maximum lifetime enforced by the service |
| Interface | unknown a notebook in the browser |
| Tooling | Jupyter; compute units on the paid tiers: Colab Pro includes 100 compute units per month and Colab Pro+ includes 600 per month, and compute units expire after 90 days |
| Composes with | none for a scheduled workload: the ceiling is discretionary on every tier |
| Reliability | no reliability event recorded |
| Notes | The paid tiers do not publish a quota either. A workload that needs a published ceiling cannot be scheduled here at any price, which is a stronger statement than 'the free tier is small'. |
| Parsed numbers |
|
Evidence 7
| date | source | what it proved |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-22 | research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html | Colab does not publish its limits because they vary over time; paid users revert to free-tier policies when units run out |
| 2026-11-03 | research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html | Colab states that it does not publish its usage limits, so no free GPU hour quota, weekly cap or card type is stated |
| 2026-11-03 | research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html | a paid user with no compute units left falls back to the free-tier policies |
| 2026-11-03 | research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html | free-tier GPU access is heavily restricted and no GPU model or hour count is published |
| 2026-11-03 | research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html | a free-tier notebook runs at most 12 hours, depending on availability and usage |
| 2026-11-03 | colab.research.google.com/signup | Colab Pro+ totals 600 compute units per month; the same page lists 100 per month for Pro and 90-day expiry |
| 2026-11-03 | colab.research.google.com/signup | paid Colab plans are sold only in a listed set of countries |
More fields 5
| billing model | wall-clock |
|---|---|
| session cap | {"wall_clock_min": 720,"idle_reap_s": null,"restart_required": false,"note": "free tier and Pro: at most 12 hours depending on availability; Pro+ background execution up to 24 hours; idle timeout not published"} |
| free tier kind | none |
| m10h usd | 19.91 |
| m24h usd | 19.91 |
Unknown values 4
- egress metered: egress metering was not published
- interface: the access interface was not established
- per object cap stated: the field does not apply to this kind of offer
- reliability note: nothing of this kind was observed