I’m at lesson 3 where Jeremy says he recommends paperspace over kaggle for this course. I created an account on paperspace and tried creating a notebook but he keeps forcing me to upgrade to $8/month. I’ve tried selecting ‘Free’ but to no avail. Is paperspace still the recommended platform for this course? Is 8/month worth it?
Hi,
It depends on how much money you can spare. Assuming you are fully committed to this course, I think it is worth it, compared to using Kaggle. However, you can also use Google Colab as well which has free option. Good thing about using paperspace is that you can setup your own environment that is permanent. Setting up process is covered in Jeremy’s live coding videos. I wrote some blogs about them. This series goes over how to program in general to setting paperspace permanent environment and competing on Kaggle.
But if you want to get your own machine, it is the best option.
I hope this is helpful.
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In the beginning stage, it’s better to stick to Kaggle or Google Colab.
Later on, if you’ve made lots of progress in the course and see yourself doing things in this field, then I would say go for the paid options if you can afford.
Kaggle and the free version of Google Colab can take you a looong way.
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Hey Thomas,
Not to take anything away from @galopy or @ForBo7, but think about what you’re using these services for. That is for a Jupyter/IPython runtime with access to a GPU that is faster than the one in your machine.
To that end all of these services offer that and by the time you’re running up to the free limits of a platform you’ll be in a much better position to apprise the options on offer. 
For me personally I like the integration in colab that saves my notebooks to google drive so I always have access to my notebooks.
To anyone just starting out have a play around with the different options and stick with the one you like the most until you have a compelling reason to switch.
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Thanks for the response. I decided to ‘splurge’ and purchased the subscription. However I’m unable to run anything. I keep getting an error that “The VM is not currently available”. I’m not expecting anyone in this forum to fix it, I’ve reached out to paperspace about it, just sharing it here for other folks.
At the moment looks like the only machines they have available are those that cost an additional of 0.7-1.50 USD/per hour, that’s on top of the 8/month subscription. So far paperspace is NOT looking good at all.
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