Google Colab free tier includes Hosted Jupyter notebooks with free access to GPUs and TPUs… Verified November 2026. Compare with 3 alternatives in AI / ML.

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Google Colab Free Tier 2026

stable

Source states a free price: The page we cite for Google Colab states in words that it is free, which confirms the price — the limits stated here come from our own record rather than from that page.

Subtypes in AI / ML: gpu_compute — sells accelerator time for code you write; the unit billed is machine time, not a model call. We read that on 2026-10-01 from https://research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html, where it says: “provides free of charge access to computing resources, including GPUs and TPUs” How we use this.

Limits, pricing history, and 3 alternatives. Verified November 2026. Last updated 2026-11-10.

Google Colab's free tier offers Hosted Jupyter notebooks with free access to GPUs and TPUs… It's stable — zero pricing changes recorded.

One of 89 AI / ML services we track. See our full AI / ML Free Tier Comparison →
Tier
Free
Category
AI / ML
Pricing Page
https://research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html
Verified
2026-11-10
Last read
2026-11-10
The day we last read the vendor's page, and the day we last confirmed the terms we publish.

Free Tier Details

Hosted Jupyter notebooks with free access to GPUs and TPUs. In the free version, notebooks run for at most 12 hours, depending on availability and usage, and idle runtimes time out. GPU access is heavily restricted, GPU and TPU types vary over time, and usage limits fluctuate. Colab Pro, Pro+ and Pay As You Go offer more compute, based on a balance of compute units.

From research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html, read 2026-11-10:
In the version of Colab that is free of charge notebooks can run for at most 12 hours, depending on availability and your usage patterns.

When You'll Outgrow Google Colab's Free Tier

Pricing Change History (0 recorded)

No recorded pricing changes for Google Colab. This is a good sign — stable pricing.

View all 513 pricing changes across all vendors →

Alternatives in AI / ML

How Google Colab compares against every one of the 3 we list, not against a selection of them. A surface with room for every member of a tied set may rotate their order. A surface with room for only some of them names none of them, because which ones it named would be the claim, and a claim seeded on the date is not the one we serve tomorrow. How we decide this.

Service Free Tier Stability
Google Colab Free stable
paperspace Free
ML platform (Gradient Notebooks, Workflows and Deployments) from Paperspace, now part of DigitalOcean. The Free plan is $0 with public projects, 5 GB of storage and free machines for Notebooks in your private workspace (Free CPU C4 and Free GPU M4000; free machines shut down after at most 6 hours).
 stable
Kaggle Free
Google's data science platform with free notebooks, datasets and competitions. Notebooks get a weekly GPU quota of 30 hours, sometimes more depending on demand (one NVIDIA Tesla P100 or two Tesla T4s), and a TPU v3-8 for up to 20 hours per week.
 stable
Modal Free
Serverless platform for running CPU and GPU workloads. The Starter plan has no monthly fee and includes $30 of compute per month (GPU, CPU and memory), 3 workspace seats, 100 containers and 10 GPU concurrency.
 caution

Left out of this list: Hugging Face (shares no subtype with this product), Groq (shares no subtype with this product), Google Gemini API (shares no subtype with this product), Mistral AI (shares no subtype with this product), OpenRouter (shares no subtype with this product), Cloudflare Workers AI (shares no subtype with this product), Cerebras (shares no subtype with this product), Cohere (shares no subtype with this product), Brave Search API (shares no subtype with this product), OpenAI (shares no subtype with this product), Pinecone (shares no subtype with this product), Qdrant (shares no subtype with this product), Deepgram (shares no subtype with this product), Roboflow (shares no subtype with this product), Scale AI (shares no subtype with this product), AssemblyAI (shares no subtype with this product), Replicate (shares no subtype with this product), Baseten (shares no subtype with this product), Weights & Biases (shares no subtype with this product), Comet ML (shares no subtype with this product), Clarifai (we have not classified this record), Neptune.ai (we have not classified this record), Labelbox (shares no subtype with this product), Composio (shares no subtype with this product), DeepAR (none of this category's subtypes apply), Maxim AI (shares no subtype with this product), OCR.Space (shares no subtype with this product), Parseur (shares no subtype with this product), Reducto (shares no subtype with this product), SerpApi (shares no subtype with this product), Tavily AI (shares no subtype with this product), Arize AX (shares no subtype with this product), Audio Enhancer (none of this category's subtypes apply), Braintrust (shares no subtype with this product), Clair (none of this category's subtypes apply), Keywords AI (shares no subtype with this product), Langfuse (shares no subtype with this product), LangSmith (shares no subtype with this product), Langtrace (we have not classified this record), LangWatch (shares no subtype with this product), Lumenfall.ai (shares no subtype with this product), Mediaworkbench.ai (none of this category's subtypes apply), Othor AI (none of this category's subtypes apply), Pollinations.AI (shares no subtype with this product), Portkey (shares no subtype with this product), ReportGPT (none of this category's subtypes apply), Zenable (none of this category's subtypes apply), xAI (shares no subtype with this product), Anthropic API (shares no subtype with this product), GitHub Models (shares no subtype with this product), NVIDIA NIM (shares no subtype with this product), Ollama Cloud (shares no subtype with this product), LLM7.io (shares no subtype with this product), SiliconFlow (shares no subtype with this product), Zhipu AI (shares no subtype with this product), DeepSeek API (shares no subtype with this product), MiniMax (shares no subtype with this product), Exa (shares no subtype with this product), GPU-Bridge (we have not classified this record), Google Vertex AI Agent Engine (we have not classified this record), Google Vector Search 2.0 (shares no subtype with this product), Google Gemini Embedding 2 (shares no subtype with this product), Alibaba Cloud Qwen Code (none of this category's subtypes apply), E2B (shares no subtype with this product), Together AI (shares no subtype with this product), Fireworks AI (shares no subtype with this product), ElevenLabs (we have not classified this record), Stability AI (we have not classified this record), Daytona (shares no subtype with this product), Blaxel (shares no subtype with this product), Novita Sandbox (shares no subtype with this product), Runloop (shares no subtype with this product), Mem0 (shares no subtype with this product), Zep (shares no subtype with this product), Letta (we have not classified this record), Supermemory (shares no subtype with this product), Cognee (shares no subtype with this product), Serper (shares no subtype with this product), Linkup (shares no subtype with this product), Parallel (shares no subtype with this product), Jina AI (shares no subtype with this product), You.com (shares no subtype with this product), Hetzner Inference API (shares no subtype with this product), Cloudflare AI Search (we have not classified this record), Valyu (shares no subtype with this product). Each is still listed in AI / ML, with the vendor's own words we read that from on its page. How we decide this.

See full comparison →

Recompute today's order yourself. The order above is a permutation seeded only on the UTC date and the query key — no vendor name, slug, id or offer field is an input. The list above is every one of the 3 entries in that order, not a prefix of it. The algorithm is published, so anyone can reproduce this page's order without asking us.
date
2026-11-14
query_key
alternatives:AI / ML:Google Colab
seed
777acc45e8cf0fe401808c86f0ae963be6ae21a8354ecaa100f417b8beb15250
tie_count
3

Comparisons

Google Colab vs Jina AI GPU-Bridge vs Google Colab Google Colab vs Maxim AI

Watch Google Colab for Pricing Changes

We do not push notifications. Every change we record is readable the moment it lands, and the JSON answer carries an ETag — send it back as If-None-Match and an unchanged answer costs one 304.

curl https://agentdeals.dev/api/changes?vendor=Google%20Colab curl https://agentdeals.dev/pricing-changes/feed.xml?vendor=Google%20Colab

API docs →

Related Guides

AI / ML Free Tier Comparison AI / ML Alternatives Guide Setup Guide Stability Dashboard

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Google Colab free?
Yes, Google Colab offers a free tier: Free. Hosted Jupyter notebooks with free access to GPUs and TPUs. In the free version, notebooks run for at most 12 hours, depending on availability and usage, and idle runtimes time out. GPU access is heav... The page we cite for Google Colab states in words that it is free, which confirms the price — the limits stated here come from our own record rather than from that page.
What is Google Colab's free tier?
Our stored record calls Google Colab's free tier "Free". Hosted Jupyter notebooks with free access to GPUs and TPUs. In the free version, notebooks run for at most 12 hours, depending on availability and usage, and idle runtimes time out. GPU access is heavily restricted, GPU and TPU types vary over time, and usage limits fluctuate. Colab Pro, Pro+ and Pay As You Go offer more compute, based on a balance of compute units. The page we cite for Google Colab states in words that it is free, which confirms the price — the limits stated here come from our own record rather than from that page. On a free runtime with no compute-unit balance, Google may terminate without warning sessions that use SSH shells, remote desktops, a web UI instead of the notebook, chess training or distributed computing workers. SSH shells, remote desktops and working in a web UI instead of the notebook are allowed on a paid plan while the compute-unit balance is positive. (From https://research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html, read 2026-10-08.) A paid Google AI plan adds a monthly allotment of Colab compute units and stronger GPUs and TPUs to the same account. Storage-only Google One plans and free trials do not. (From https://research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html, read 2026-10-08.) Google AI Plus adds 50 Colab compute units a month, but not during a free trial of the plan. (From https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/16882689, read 2026-10-16.) Google AI Pro adds 200 Colab compute units a month, but not during a free trial of the plan. (From https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/14534406, read 2026-10-16.) Google AI Ultra adds 1,000 or 2,000 Colab compute units a month, depending on the plan, with longer background execution and premium GPU access, but not during a free trial of the plan. (From https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/16286513, read 2026-10-16.) Colab Pro for Education, a free year of Colab Pro for students and faculty at US universities, is closed to new signups. (From https://research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html, read 2026-10-16.) A running notebook can be terminated if compute units run out. The account then uses the free tier's rules until more units are added. (From https://research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html, read 2026-10-10.) Colab bans file hosting, media serving and other web services not related to interactive compute on every managed runtime, free or paid. (From https://research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html, read 2026-10-10.) Google publishes no RAM figure for Colab. The free version gets VMs with a standard system memory profile. Paid plans can get a high memory system profile, subject to availability and the compute unit balance. (From https://research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html, read 2026-10-23.) On Colab Pro+ with a positive compute unit balance, a running notebook keeps executing after the browser closes, for up to 24 hours. Idle VMs are still deleted. Colab Pro gets extended execution times based on availability. Without a paid subscription, execution stops when you stop interacting. (From https://colab.research.google.com/signup, read 2026-10-23.) Google Colab offers Pay As You Go at $9.99 for 100 Compute Units or $49.99 for 500 Compute Units, with no subscription. Colab Pro is $9.99 per month for 100 compute units. Colab Pro+ is $49.99 per month for 600 compute units. Compute units are not refundable, not transferable, and expire after 90 days. These are US prices. (From https://colab.research.google.com/signup, read 2026-11-09.)
Is Google Colab's free tier reliable?
Google Colab's free tier is considered stable.
Is Google Colab's free tier good for production?
Google Colab's free tier can be suitable for small production workloads and side projects. We rate it stable and it offers Hosted Jupyter notebooks with free access to GPUs and TPUs…, so it's a reasonable starting point. Monitor your usage against the limits and have an upgrade plan ready.
What changed in Google Colab's pricing?
No, Google Colab has had no recorded pricing changes. This is a positive stability signal.
What are the best free alternatives to Google Colab?
We publish no ranking of these. Nothing we record measures popularity or generosity, so naming a best or a top few would be our preference rather than our data. We hold 3 free alternatives to Google Colab in AI / ML, each listed above with its tier. Of those, 3 carry no recorded demerit and are indistinguishable under every signal we hold, so they are listed in an order that rotates daily. Our ranking rule is published at /criteria.
When will I outgrow Google Colab's free tier?
When your usage exceeds the free tier limits, you'll need to upgrade. When you outgrow the free tier, evaluate paid plans against alternatives — sometimes a competitor's free tier covers what you need.
What category is Google Colab in?
Google Colab is categorized under AI / ML on AgentDeals. We list 3 other AI / ML services alongside it, every one of them on this page with its free tier and the stability we publish for it.