I haven't used colab externally, but internally in Google it is used as a scratchpad for quick and dirty trying out an idea. By the time you realize the idea may lead up to something, you also hit some specific libraries or resources you need to get which are not available in colab. Then you go ahead and build and deploy a proper solution, which I understand what your Cloud VM would lead to.

As such, I don't think there would be a market for quick and dirty scratchpads backed by rock solid but expensive dedicated compute.