Best offer on record: Colab Free Tier (Notebooks) — free CPU/GPU/TPU runtimes. 3 verified findings, checked 2026-10-22.
Offers
Colab Free Tier (Notebooks) — free CPU/GPU/TPU runtimes high confidence
Browser-hosted Jupyter notebooks, free of charge, with CPU-only and free GPU + TPU runtime options. Free sessions run for at most 12 hours; idle VMs are deleted after inactivity. No fixed/published compute quota — Google states the specific GPU and TPU types available "vary over time" (community-reported free GPU is commonly an NVIDIA T4, 16 GB; official FAQ does not name a guaranteed model). No credit card required — sign in with a Google account. Free (no compute-unit balance) runtimes are shared/preemptible and prohibit: file hosting, torrent/P2P, remote shells & desktops, bypassing the notebook UI, remote proxies, crypto mining, DoS, password cracking, multi-account abuse, deepfakes, distributed-compute workers, and containerization to evade anti-abuse checks.
Eligibility
Anyone with a Google account. No .edu email required, no region restriction stated in the FAQ, and no credit card required.
How to claim
Go to colab.research.google.com, sign in with any Google account, open/create a notebook, then Runtime > Change runtime type > Hardware accelerator = GPU or TPU. No signup form or payment.
Expiry
No subscription expiry. Each session is capped at ~12 hours; idle VMs are deleted. Notebooks/models persist only if saved to Google Drive (Drive free-tier 15 GB shared).
Gotchas
Free GPU/TPU are shared and intermittently unavailable (no guaranteed quota; may be interrupted under high demand). T4 vs TPU specifics not officially fixed. Paid products (Colab Pro / Pro+ / Pay-As-You-Go, billed on a compute-unit balance; Pro+ up to 24 h continuous with enough units) are separate from free — do not conflate. Free runtimes carry the anti-abuse restrictions above.
Colab Pro for Education (students & faculty) high confidence
Formerly a FREE 1-year Colab Pro subscription for students and faculty of US-based universities (more compute than the free tier). Per the official FAQ it is now CLOSED: "no longer available for new signups at this time." Previously-verified education users keep access until their 1-year anniversary.
Eligibility
Was: US-based university students/faculty (typically .edu verification). Now: new signups not accepted.
How to claim
No longer claimable for new users. Existing verified education users retain access until their 1-year subscription end.
Expiry
Existing subscriptions expire at the 1-year mark; new signups are closed. Upgrading to a paid personal plan permanently unsubscribes the free education benefit.
Gotchas
Sunset offer. Do not pay for a personal Colab Pro/Pro+ assuming it replaces the education benefit — doing so terminates the free edu subscription permanently.
No Colab-specific startup program or Colab trial credits (GCP credits do NOT apply) low confidence
There is no Colab-specific startup program and no free Colab trial-credit offer. The adjacent offers are Google Cloud ones: a Startup Program (tiered credits, roughly $500 up to ~$100K) and a new-account Free Trial (historically ~$300 over ~90 days, credit card typically required). These credits apply to GCP services (GCE, Vertex AI, GKE, BigQuery, etc.), NOT to Colab's free tier or to Colab Pro/Pro+ subscriptions.
Eligibility
Startup Program: for-profit company, founded within the last ~3 years, raised under ~$50M, in a supported region. Free Trial: new GCP account (CC historically required). Neither grants free Colab.
How to claim
Not claimable for Colab. To use the credits you run self-hosted GCP workloads (Vertex AI / GKE / GCE) instead of Colab.
Could not re-verify live GCP figures today (cloud.google.com/programs/startup returned 404; /free and /colab/pricing were truncated/JS-rendered) — treat the credit amounts and caps as approximate/low-confidence. Colab free tier itself needs no CC and no credits.
Sunset / materially changed (2025–2026): (1) COLAB PRO FOR EDUCATION — the formerly free 1-year Colab Pro subscription for US university students/faculty is now CLOSED to new signups (official FAQ, read 2026-10-22); only pre-verified users keep access until their 1-year anniversary, and upgrading to a paid personal plan terminates it permanently. (2) NO COLAB-STARTUP OFFER — there is no Colab-specific startup program or free Colab trial-credit; the only \"credits\" are Google Cloud Startup Program / new-account Free Trial, which do NOT apply to Colab. Method note: web-search budget was exhausted this session, so 2025–2026 change-detection relied on the official FAQ fetched today plus best-effort GCP fetches; GCP credit amounts/eligibility could not be re-verified live (target pages 404'd or truncated), so treat those figures as approximate.