So the way I would describe your progression as a student (at least from my experience):

- Traditional ML -> probably can run on your laptop

- Simple DL -> colab is great. Cheapest there is.

- SOTA DL -> you're probably looking at training times well into 10s of hours / days, so you'll need something that can last longer than 12h of colab time. Plus at this point you're probably sophisticated enough that you want to setup your instance once and start/stop it rather than going through setup with colab every time. That's where https://gpu.land/ fits it.

So tl;dr; - absolutely use colab first (it's cheapest), but when you outgrow it, consider gpu.land.