Google Colab (free (no subscription))
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
- Free of charge access to computing resources including GPUs and TPUs; a notebook runs for at most 12 hours; usage limits, idle timeout, maximum VM lifetime and GPU types are not published and vary over time
- Verdict
- caveatusable, with a named limit or an unprobed read path
- Cost
- free tier
- Identity
- emailno card, no phone
- Binding limit
- volume-quotaan unpublished, fluctuating usage limit on GPU and total compute; 12 hours maximum notebook runtime
- Evidence
- documented10 sources; a first-party page was read and the sentence quoted
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-11-25checked 2026-10-25 (live); stale on 2026-11-25
| Free tier | free of charge access to computing resources including GPUs and TPUs; a notebook runs for at most 12 hours; usage limits, idle timeout, maximum VM lifetime and GPU types are not published and vary over time unit hours; metered on unstated; There is no published GPU-hour number. Anything quoted for Colab's free GPU quota is somebody's recollection. |
|---|---|
| Price | none stated |
| Limits |
a documented absence: 'Colab does not publish these limits' is a discretionary throttle, not a quota |
| Binding | volume-quota the quota is real but unquantified, so it cannot be planned against; the 12-hour wall is the only number the vendor will commit to |
| Identity | email a Google account; no card for the free tier |
| Egress | no published egress allowance or price for the notebook runtime |
| Per-object cap | not applicable: the unit is a session, not an object |
| Retention | the VM disk is deleted when the runtime is recycled; only Google Drive survives |
| Interface | rest, cli a notebook in the browser; no SSH and no inbound port |
| Tooling | Jupyter; the Colab client; no shell beyond the notebook's |
| Composes with | a notebook is not a machine: nothing survives the runtime, so it cannot hold state or serve |
| Reliability | Colab states outright that it prioritises interactive users and that runtimes time out when idle, so a long job is cut for reasons a user cannot see |
| Notes | What would settle them is running a probe notebook that reports /proc/meminfo and nvidia-smi, which needs an account. |
| Evidence note | documented the 12-hour cap and the refusal to publish the rest are quoted from the vendor FAQ. RAM and GPU class are unverified because the page states a 'standard memory profile' without a number. |
| Parsed numbers |
|
Evidence 10
| date | source | what it proved |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-22 | research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html | in the free version notebooks can run for at most 12 hours, depending on availability and usage patterns |
| 2026-10-22 | research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html | 'Colab does not publish these limits, in part because they can vary over time' |
| 2026-10-22 | research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html | virtual machines are deleted when idle for a while and have a maximum lifetime enforced by the service |
| 2026-10-22 | research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html | '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', with 'Colab does not publish these limits, in part because they can vary over time' and 'access to expensive resources like GPUs is heavily restricted', all quoted |
| 2026-10-24 | research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html | quoted: '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.' |
| 2026-10-24 | research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html | quoted: 'Colab does not publish these limits, in part because they can vary over time.' |
| 2026-10-24 | research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html | quoted: 'Virtual machines are deleted when idle for a while, and have a maximum lifetime enforced by the Colab service.' |
| 2026-10-24 | research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html | quoted: 'Colab prioritizes interactive compute. Runtimes will time out if you are idle.' |
| 2026-10-24 | research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html | quoted: 'In the version of Colab that is free of charge you are able to access VMs with a standard system memory profile.' — no number is given |
| 2026-10-24 | research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html | quoted: 'on higher plans, additional capabilities such as background execution' — background execution is a paid-plan feature, so the free tier cannot run unattended |
More fields 16
{
"shape": {
"vcpu": null,
"ram_gib": null,
"disk_gib": null,
"gpu_class": null,
"gpu_count": null,
"note": "the vendor publishes no numbers; GPU type 'varies over time'"
},
"billing_model": "free",
"granularity": {
"min_billed_s": null,
"rounding_s": null
},
"session_cap": {
"wall_clock_min": 720,
"idle_reap_s": null,
"restart_required": true,
"note": "12 h cap; idle timeout and VM lifetime unpublished"
},
"keep_rate": {
"value": 0.0,
"basis": "a deleted runtime costs nothing",
"source": "https://research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html"
},
"persistent_storage": {
"included_gib": null,
"price_gib_month": null,
"durability": "none: the VM is deleted",
"survives_stop": false,
"survives_destroy": false,
"max_retention": "the runtime"
},
"network_out": {
"allow_outbound": true,
"allow_inbound_listen": false,
"ports": "outbound only",
"static_ip": false,
"ipv6": false,
"per_session_bytes": null
},
"free_tier_kind": "free-forever-with-unpublished-quota",
"m10h_usd": 0.0,
"m24h_usd": 0.0,
"facets": {},
"term": "none",
"price_arithmetic": "USD 0.00 for the free tier",
"unattended": false,
"unattended_mechanism": "none on the free tier; background execution is listed as a paid-plan capability",
"units": "RAM and disk are quoted in the vendor's own decimal GB, not GiB. The ram_gib and disk_gib keys carry the vendor's number unconverted, so where a vendor writes 30 GB the key holds 30 and the true value is about 27.9 GiB. No conversion was performed."
}Corrections
- 2026-10-22 Google Colab's free tier is a standing service, not a trial