Where to find small Models ?

Hello, I'm a student on a very tight budget and have no GPU at my disposal and I'm barely running on a Surface Pro. I want to improve my skills by replicating some research papers. This is good in theory, but every paper requires a lot of computational power, which I do not have access to. As a result, I'm never able to properly train and test models. This inability to "play" with the models prevents me from developing an intuition about what is done, why it is done, and how I could enhance them.

I know I could use Colab, but notebooks are a real pain to use when papers are long and require structuring a real project around them. Also, even though Python can be considered the de facto standard, I want to be free from it and be able to use other languages, such as Rust or C++, to better enhance my skills.

I'm fine with using AWS, Azure, or GCP, but I would like to keep the cost at a bare minimum. Realistically, the maximum I can afford per project is around $20. Do you have any suggestions on where I can find these kinds of models?