What you get, and what it costs
Numbers you need mid-decision should not be buried mid-paragraph across nine units, so every reference table lives on this one page. First pass: read the credits table and set your budget alerts before you touch anything billable. After that, come back whenever a decision has a dollar sign in it.
Figures as published in the source guide. Pricing, tiers, and hardware move. Verify anything you are about to spend against before you spend it.
Subscription tiers at a glance
| Plan | Cost | Storage | Key AI access |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 15 GB | Limited Gemini, T4 GPU when available |
| AI Plus | $7.99/mo | 200 GB | Expanded Gemini usage, Veo 2 video generation |
| AI Pro | $19.99/mo, free for students | 5 TB | Gemini 3.1 Pro, Deep Research, L4 GPUs, MCP |
| AI Ultra | $249.99/mo | 30 TB | Highest quotas, $100/mo cloud credits, A100 GPUs |
Colab GPU access by tier
| GPU | VRAM | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| T4 (free tier) | 15 GB | Prototyping, fine-tuning small models, most coursework |
| L4 (Pro, $11.99/mo) | 22.5 GB | Transformer fine-tuning, medium training runs |
| A100 40 GB (Pro+) | 40 GB | Large model training, LLM work, serious research |
| A100 80 GB (Pro+) | 80 GB | Very large models, multi-GPU experiments |
Must-have MCP servers for data scientists
| Server | Category | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub | Source control | Review PRs, track issues, analyse repo history |
| BigQuery | Database | Query schemas and reason over live data in natural language |
| Firecrawl | Web scraper | Scrape any URL into clean text for literature reviews |
| Hugging Face | AI hub | Browse models, datasets, and papers from the terminal |
| Notion | Knowledge base | Access team specs, roadmaps, and decision docs |
Choosing the right tool
| Task | Best tool |
|---|---|
| Chat-based research, writing, summarising documents | Gemini Advanced (browser) |
| Search your Drive files and email with AI | Gemini + @Drive / @Gmail |
| Automate file ops, run shell scripts, generate code in a terminal | gemini-cli |
| Interactive data analysis, model training, Python notebooks | Google Colab AI |
| Multi-agent coding, full codebase navigation | Google Antigravity (preview) |
Credits and guardrails
- The AI Pro subscription includes $10/month in Google Cloud credits ($120 across the year) on top of the $300 free trial every new GCP account receives.
- Activate the monthly credits at developers.google.com/profile after setting up the student offer.
- Credits are routed through Vertex AI. They do not cover direct Gemini API calls made through Google AI Studio; those accrue separate charges.
- Set budget alerts at 50% and 90% before running any GPU jobs, under Billing → Budgets & Alerts.
- Budget alerts send emails only. They do not stop services automatically. Spend caps took effect April 1, 2026.
- PhD students can apply for Research Credits (up to $1,000/year for coursework-adjacent projects) at edu.google.com/programs/credits/research with a short proposal.
- Vertex AI: managed ML training, model deployment, and AutoML. A production-ready Colab with persistent environments, guaranteed GPU access, and real API endpoints.
- Model Garden: one-click access to 200+ models including Gemini, Llama, Mistral, and Stable Diffusion.
- Document AI: structured data out of PDFs, scanned documents, and forms. Basic OCR covers roughly 200,000 pages on a $300 credit.
- GPU VMs: dedicated T4, L4, or A100 instances with no session timeouts. Spot VMs run 60–90% cheaper. Pair them with checkpoint saves.
- BigQuery: 1 TB of free SQL queries per month plus 200+ public datasets, pullable into Colab with one line of Python.
- The student offer is currently US-only for new sign-ups, and auto-renews at $19.99/month unless cancelled before twelve months are up.