Google Colab Pro and compute units: prices, plans and what you get

Colab plans and prices

If you keep hitting the limits of Google Colab's free tier, there are a few paid ways to get more compute. We checked the US prices on Colab's signup page on 30 October 2026; they differ by country, and in Germany Pro showed as 11,01 € and Pro+ as 50,28 €.

What a compute unit is

How far a unit goes depends on your VM and on the GPU or TPU attached to it. Google does not publish a units-per-hour rate for each GPU, so the only reliable number is your own: note your balance, run your usual GPU for an hour, and check again.

The signup page is blunt about the shelf life: "Compute units expire after 90 days." Units you buy or get through a plan are not refundable and not transferable. Google also restricts buying more units while you already hold a large balance, and after a purchase Colab may not be able to keep your current runtime, so don't top up in the middle of a training run.

When your balance hits zero, you drop back to free-tier access. The FAQ also warns that you "can expect to experience backend termination if you exhaust your available compute units" on Pro, Pro+ or Pay As You Go, which means a long run can die when the balance runs out.

What Colab Pro adds over the free tier

On the free tier, GPU access is "heavily restricted", notebooks run for at most 12 hours, and runtimes time out when idle. The GPU types on offer "vary over time".

For $9.99 a month, Colab Pro gives you 100 units and lets you upgrade to faster GPUs, subject to availability and your balance. You also get the highest-memory machines, an expanded Gemini quota and "extended execution times and saving of output to Drive based on availability".

What Colab Pro+ adds

Colab Pro+ costs $49.99 a month and includes everything in Pro, plus "an additional 500 compute units per month, totaling 600", priority access to premium GPUs and the maximum Gemini quota.

What Pro+ really buys you is background execution. In Google's words, "With compute units, your actively running notebook will continue running for up to 24hrs, even if you close your browser." Idle time still deletes the VM, so this only helps while a cell is actually running.

One billing catch: there is no direct downgrade from Pro+ to Pro. To step down, you cancel and subscribe again.

Google AI plans now include Colab compute units

Before you subscribe on the Colab page, check whether you already pay for a Google AI plan. Google AI Plus is $4.99 a month with 50 Colab units, Google AI Pro is $19.99 a month with 200 units and 5 TB of storage, and Google AI Ultra starts at $99.99 a month with up to 2,000 units.

A Google AI plan and a Colab subscription can run on the same account, and their units add up in one balance. Colab even tells AI plan subscribers their plan "already includes Colab Pro's compute benefits", so check before you pay for both.

Is Colab Pro worth it?

For occasional use, Pay As You Go ($9.99 for 100 units) or Google AI Plus ($4.99 a month for 50 units) gets you past free-tier limits without a monthly Colab subscription. Keep the 90-day expiry in mind before you buy the 500-unit pack.

For regular work on faster GPUs, Colab Pro at $9.99 a month or Google AI Pro at $19.99 a month (200 units plus 5 TB of storage) makes more sense. Kaggle runs an experimental, limited-time promotion that gives linked Colab Pro accounts 15 extra GPU hours a week and Pro+ accounts 30, on top of Kaggle's own free weekly quota.

For overnight training, Pro+ at $49.99 a month is the only Colab plan with up to 24 hours of background execution. If you need longer, steadier runs, a rented cloud GPU billed per second is often simpler than a stack of compute units.

Stop paying for a finished or dead runtime

Google's own advice is to close Colab tabs when you're done and to avoid GPUs or extra memory when your work doesn't need them. That's easy at your desk and hard when a run ends at 3 a.m.

In a notebook, use the drop-in tqdm from tqdm_live, because the notebook widget bar is not streamed. The kernel stays alive after the last cell, a crashed cell doesn't end it, and a deleted VM can't send a message, so the stall alert is your signal. Keep the window at 30 minutes or less.