Skillable is one of the four partners Microsoft recommends for customers leaving Azure Lab Services. This page compares it with Hyperamplify Labs for a small college or training provider. Skillable's prices are from its public Lab Services price table, checked on 30 September 2026. Check with Skillable before you decide.
Price
| Skillable | Hyperamplify Labs | |
|---|---|---|
| How you pay | About $1.16 to $1.20 per small VM-hour, all in | $0.50 per Ubuntu hour, $0.75 per Windows hour |
| Minimum | Check with Skillable | $49 per month |
| 50 students, 10 hours a week, 4 weeks | about $2,300 to $2,400 | about $1,050 on Ubuntu, $1,575 on Windows |
| 100 students at the same pace | about $5,100 | about $2,100 on Ubuntu |
Roughly $1 of Skillable's hour is its orchestration, on top of about $0.16 to $0.20 of Azure.
Where Skillable is the better choice
- You want to stay on Azure. Skillable runs on Azure and can work with your Azure Compute Gallery images. Hyperamplify Labs runs on Google Cloud.
- You want an established vendor. Skillable is an established product.
- You need features we do not have yet, such as kept student disks, LMS integration, or GPU sizes. Ask Skillable which of these it covers for your use.
Where Hyperamplify Labs is the better choice
- Price for small classes. At about half the hourly price, a small college's term costs less, and the $49 minimum keeps a 10-student class affordable.
- Built for a term. Hours per student with a hard stop, a term end date that ends every machine, and reset to the image are the core of the product, not settings to find.
- Your staff build the image in the browser, and every saved version is kept, so a class never changes in the middle of a term.
- Run it from an AI agent. A public API and an MCP server let a technician set up labs and build images from Claude or another agent.
The short version
If you are a large Azure customer, Skillable is a natural fit. If you are a small college that wants a lower hourly price and a product built around one teacher running one term, get started with Hyperamplify Labs.