Time's short so I personally would be sticking with notebook style environments, but for a longer course I think more exposure to diversity would be good

Oh I only threw 100K out there as an extreme/max; whatever I would do would be teensy!

Haven't heard of this one either, will check it out!

Great! Hopefully that's still true after their recent change of business model

This reads weirdly hostile. The fact of the matter is that there *are* free services online more generous than your claims, some of which have been posted here already, and which provide alternative ways to think about it, or backups in case Colab for whatever reasons fell through.

I noted in my post that I don't need GPUs

I didn't really understand how things changed after their new business model move, but just got someone with a fresh account to try it out last night, and they were fine without any compute units so that's good! What I worry about though is that with them having a pay-as-you-go model now, free might have more disruptions to service, which wouldn't work in an educational environment. Would be nice to know how likely that is

This really is an amazing suggestion and something that I'm surprised I haven't heard of before, thanks!

That's good to know! My guess is then that it just becomes a "resources aren't guaranteed" thing? That's... tricky if so since you wouldn't want a student getting stuck mid day colab not serving up another/longer session. Curious if anyone knows more on that?

I've still got a Pro subscription that needs to time out to see what it's like without it, but doesn't it still use compute units if there's no GPU? And wouldn't users still need to buy a first set of them if so?