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Google Colab (paid tiers)

research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.htmlNotebook runtimecompute/google-colab-paidJSON compare report an error provider JSON

Sibling records disagree:

identity_kind: compute/google-colab says email, compute/google-colab-paid says card
verdict: compute/google-colab says 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: documented1 source; a first-party page was read and the sentence quoted
Freshness: stale on 2026-11-22checked 2026-10-22 (live); stale on 2026-11-22

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to the free policies when compute units are exhausted unit none; metered on wall-clock; a paid tier whose limits are unpublished cannot be budgeted
Price	none stated
Limits	request-rate (binding) compute units are a separate currency and their consumption is not published source retention-clamped paid users whose compute units are exhausted revert to the free tier policies source 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Binding	request-rate the compute-unit allowance binds and the policies behind it are unpublished, so there is no ceiling to schedule against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
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
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Notes	The paid tiers do not publish a quota either.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	price USD 19.91 / month price USD 19.91 / month

Evidence 1

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

More fields 9

{
 "shape": null,
 "billing_model": "wall-clock",
 "session_cap": null,
 "keep_rate": null,
 "persistent_storage": null,
 "network_out": null,
 "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