4 ms·

Just wanted to share a Colab alternative I work on called Gradient[0] (also includes a free GPU). Some of the key differences: - Faster storage. Colab uses Go

Just wanted to share a Colab alternative I work on called Gradient[0] (also includes a free GPU). Some of the key differences: - Faster storage. Colab uses Google Drive which is convenient to use but very slow. For example, training datasets often contain a large amount of small files (eg 50k images in the sample TensorFlow and PyTorch datasets). Colab will start to crawl when it tries to ingest these files which is a really standard workflow for ML/DL. It's great for toy projects eg training MNIST but not for training more interesting models that are popular in the research/professional communities today. - Notebooks are fully persistent. With Colab, you need to re-install everything every time you start your Notebook. - Colab instances can be shutdown (preempted) in the middle of a session leading to potential loss of work. Gradient will guarantee the entire session. - Gradient offers the ability to add more storage and higher-end dedicated GPUs from the same environment. If you want to train a more sophisticated model that requires say a day or two of training and maybe a 1TB dataset, that's all possible. You could even use the 1-click deploy option to make your model available as an API endpoint. The free GPU tier is just an entrypoint into a full production-ready ML pipeline. With Colab, you would need to take your model somewhere else to accomplish these more advanced tasks. - A large repository of ML templates that include all the major frameworks eg the obvious TensorFlow and PyTorch but also MXNet, Chainer, CNTK, etc. Gradient also includes a public datasets repository with a growing list of common datasets freely available to use in your projects. Those are the main pieces but happy to elaborate on any of this or other questions! [0] https://gradient.paperspace.com https://gradient.paperspace.com

m0zg 7y ago
After spending 5 minutes on the site, I could not figure out what an offering comparable to Colab Pro would cost me (i.e. single instance of a notebook hooked up to P100), and bailed. In contrast, Google puts pricing front and center, which makes me feel better about their value prop in spite of the fine print around limits and preemptibility.
- dragonsh 7y ago
  I have been a user of colab and recommended to many friends. As mentioned in the other thread the session time of colab notebook is too low, so increasing it for pro is good, but still if one has a large data for testing and training, dependency on google drive or products becomes one another bottleneck, but not that bad. My biggest concern with google product is, it might be shut down any time when any small and medium company begins to depend on it. This is the legacy of google in which anything which cannot generate revenues like it's advertising business it's shut down. So although my team use from time to time google colab, we keep an alternative always open. Hopefully with this 9.99/month charge it might become viable business but will not be as significant as the google's primary business of advertising, so there will always be sword at the neck of this product.
  - m0zg 7y ago
    The issue is not as acute in this case. These are just Jupyter notebooks, you'll be able to run them on your own hardware with minimal, if any, modifications, unless you choose to use TPUs.
    - dragonsh 7y ago
      We use both GPU and TPU, but use our own installed Jupyter to keep a copy as backup. Many of our developers like colab, just the reason we keep backup because we have been bitten by google shutting down services more than once. In one case we need to do a re-write of the complete app.
- fibrennan 7y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. Instance pricing is currently listed here (https://gradient.paperspace.com/instances https://gradient.paperspace.com/instances) but we're working to make it simpler.
  - m0zg 7y ago
    Thanks for not being defensive. I do believe there's not enough competition in this space, so I wish you guys the best of luck. Let's look at the page you linked. On the top of the page it says "free GPU" and for some reason lists three GPU options of varying capacity, all three "free". But slightly below it's very much "non-free GPU" territory. Which is it? Is it free, or are you going to hit me with a bill later? And if it's free, what's the catch? The "free" stuff on the top of the page invites me to create an instance. Hmm, ok, let's see maybe I'll see the actual pricing there? Nope, it wants me to create an account, which I'm not going to do just to see how much something costs.
    - snuxoll 7y ago
      6-hour time limit on free instances, there’s a banner at the top of the page linking to an announcement with this detail. Might be wise to make this more visible on the pricing page.
  - sireat 7y ago
    A small nitpick: the blurry background when hovering on Create really felt off. I felt like my vision had just suddenly worsened and felt an urge to click away to a different card.
  - arnaudsm 7y ago
    Really interesting product, but please disable the notification sound of your chatbot!
    - fibrennan 7y ago
      We agree. Notification sound has now been disabled.
dannyw 7y ago
I found Gradient and Paperspace pricing to be incredibly opaque, and even a bit deceptive. First of all, Colab works on a "resources are free, just not guaranteed" model. When I was about to sign up for Developer, with "Free + Low-Mid Instance Types", I expected that I would have reasonable, shared access to low-mid instances as part of my subscription. (otherwise.. what am I paying for? Don't charge me... to charge me.) I then found out that you have to pay a per hourly cost for low-mid instance types; making it a better buy to just use AWS and GCP directly yourself. (When you suspend instances on GCP, you don't get billed for CPU or GPU hours; just storage). And finally, after that, I found out I had to separately for storage, as well as a $5 deposit minimum or something like that! Colab doesn't have anything like this. AWS doesn't bill a minimum of $5 for each instance, even if you spin it down after a few minutes. And finally, I couldn't even use the instances I thought I'd get access to, because you're out of availability. Which is really questionable: I'm paying per-hour rates, on top of a SaaS monthly subscription, and plus storage costs with minimum floors (probably a high margin item for you); for a very constrained capacity of GPUs? We overpay for AWS, and GCP (their margins are insane! esp on bandwidth) because they guarantee most people availability. If I want to deploy 3 gigantic instances for a few hours, (and I have the right quota limits); I can. Sure I'm paying a lot more than what I should, but it's like taxi drivers: you're not just paying for the cabbies time as he drives you, but also his idle time as he looks for a customer. I don't understand what I am paying for here. I feel like I'm just being charged margin for you to wrap around GCP or AWS with a colorful UI. I do not feel comfortable with you having my credit card details. If you made a subscription, around $20 per month maybe, that gave me reasonable access to a mid-tier GPU instance subject to capacity at no marginal cost, I would happily subscribe. Until then, I'm going with Colab, because the beauty is that your costs are fixed and not marginal.
- dkobran 7y ago
  Clarifying a few inaccurate points: The Colab model of "resources are free, just not guaranteed" model” that you mentioned is literally identical to Gradient: The free tier includes spare capacity at no cost just like Colab. You can upgrade to access high-end instances eg the NVIDIA V100. These additional instances do not have a max runtime as well. I can’t see how this would be a con given this additional option is simply not available in Colab. Gradient does not have a $5 deposit for storage, the free plan does not cost anything. There is no credit card required. In fact, Gradient doesn’t charge for storage at all.
Youden 7y ago
Some more feedback: When I open the linked page, the page title instantly starts flashing between the actual title and "(2) New Messages!". At that point I knew without a doubt that this was not a product I would ever use. The "Contact Sales" button on the landing page makes things even more confusing. On the one hand you're using abusive practices like the one above to grab attention, something I usually associate with cheap, low-quality consumer products. On the other hand, your main call-to-action is "Contact Sales", something associated with white-glove enterprise-type products.
- fibrennan 7y ago
  Agreed. Tab flashing has been disabled.

m0zg 7y ago

After spending 5 minutes on the site, I could not figure out what an offering comparable to Colab Pro would cost me (i.e. single instance of a notebook hooked up to P100), and bailed. In contrast, Google puts pricing front and center, which makes me feel better about their value prop in spite of the fine print around limits and preemptibility.

dragonsh 7y ago
I have been a user of colab and recommended to many friends. As mentioned in the other thread the session time of colab notebook is too low, so increasing it for pro is good, but still if one has a large data for testing and training, dependency on google drive or products becomes one another bottleneck, but not that bad. My biggest concern with google product is, it might be shut down any time when any small and medium company begins to depend on it. This is the legacy of google in which anything which cannot generate revenues like it's advertising business it's shut down. So although my team use from time to time google colab, we keep an alternative always open. Hopefully with this 9.99/month charge it might become viable business but will not be as significant as the google's primary business of advertising, so there will always be sword at the neck of this product.
- m0zg 7y ago
  The issue is not as acute in this case. These are just Jupyter notebooks, you'll be able to run them on your own hardware with minimal, if any, modifications, unless you choose to use TPUs.
  - dragonsh 7y ago
    We use both GPU and TPU, but use our own installed Jupyter to keep a copy as backup. Many of our developers like colab, just the reason we keep backup because we have been bitten by google shutting down services more than once. In one case we need to do a re-write of the complete app.
fibrennan 7y ago
Thanks for the feedback. Instance pricing is currently listed here (https://gradient.paperspace.com/instances https://gradient.paperspace.com/instances) but we're working to make it simpler.
- m0zg 7y ago
  Thanks for not being defensive. I do believe there's not enough competition in this space, so I wish you guys the best of luck. Let's look at the page you linked. On the top of the page it says "free GPU" and for some reason lists three GPU options of varying capacity, all three "free". But slightly below it's very much "non-free GPU" territory. Which is it? Is it free, or are you going to hit me with a bill later? And if it's free, what's the catch? The "free" stuff on the top of the page invites me to create an instance. Hmm, ok, let's see maybe I'll see the actual pricing there? Nope, it wants me to create an account, which I'm not going to do just to see how much something costs.
  - snuxoll 7y ago
    6-hour time limit on free instances, there’s a banner at the top of the page linking to an announcement with this detail. Might be wise to make this more visible on the pricing page.
- sireat 7y ago
  A small nitpick: the blurry background when hovering on Create really felt off. I felt like my vision had just suddenly worsened and felt an urge to click away to a different card.
- arnaudsm 7y ago
  Really interesting product, but please disable the notification sound of your chatbot!
  - fibrennan 7y ago
    We agree. Notification sound has now been disabled.

dannyw 7y ago

I found Gradient and Paperspace pricing to be incredibly opaque, and even a bit deceptive. First of all, Colab works on a "resources are free, just not guaranteed" model. When I was about to sign up for Developer, with "Free + Low-Mid Instance Types", I expected that I would have reasonable, shared access to low-mid instances as part of my subscription. (otherwise.. what am I paying for? Don't charge me... to charge me.) I then found out that you have to pay a per hourly cost for low-mid instance types; making it a better buy to just use AWS and GCP directly yourself. (When you suspend instances on GCP, you don't get billed for CPU or GPU hours; just storage). And finally, after that, I found out I had to separately for storage, as well as a $5 deposit minimum or something like that! Colab doesn't have anything like this. AWS doesn't bill a minimum of $5 for each instance, even if you spin it down after a few minutes. And finally, I couldn't even use the instances I thought I'd get access to, because you're out of availability. Which is really questionable: I'm paying per-hour rates, on top of a SaaS monthly subscription, and plus storage costs with minimum floors (probably a high margin item for you); for a very constrained capacity of GPUs? We overpay for AWS, and GCP (their margins are insane! esp on bandwidth) because they guarantee most people availability. If I want to deploy 3 gigantic instances for a few hours, (and I have the right quota limits); I can. Sure I'm paying a lot more than what I should, but it's like taxi drivers: you're not just paying for the cabbies time as he drives you, but also his idle time as he looks for a customer. I don't understand what I am paying for here. I feel like I'm just being charged margin for you to wrap around GCP or AWS with a colorful UI. I do not feel comfortable with you having my credit card details. If you made a subscription, around $20 per month maybe, that gave me reasonable access to a mid-tier GPU instance subject to capacity at no marginal cost, I would happily subscribe. Until then, I'm going with Colab, because the beauty is that your costs are fixed and not marginal.

dkobran 7y ago
Clarifying a few inaccurate points: The Colab model of "resources are free, just not guaranteed" model” that you mentioned is literally identical to Gradient: The free tier includes spare capacity at no cost just like Colab. You can upgrade to access high-end instances eg the NVIDIA V100. These additional instances do not have a max runtime as well. I can’t see how this would be a con given this additional option is simply not available in Colab. Gradient does not have a $5 deposit for storage, the free plan does not cost anything. There is no credit card required. In fact, Gradient doesn’t charge for storage at all.

Youden 7y ago

Some more feedback: When I open the linked page, the page title instantly starts flashing between the actual title and "(2) New Messages!". At that point I knew without a doubt that this was not a product I would ever use. The "Contact Sales" button on the landing page makes things even more confusing. On the one hand you're using abusive practices like the one above to grab attention, something I usually associate with cheap, low-quality consumer products. On the other hand, your main call-to-action is "Contact Sales", something associated with white-glove enterprise-type products.

fibrennan 7y ago
Agreed. Tab flashing has been disabled.