What PAYG providers do people here recommend? Most powerful machine at home is an M1 MBA (16GB), so I too am interested in short term options where I can still benefit from the privacy of local models

Runpod

Seconding runpod.

They were having availability issues with GPUs (of course) but especially their UI where you'd customise a template only to try to start a pod, the GPU be unavailable and the UI reset forcing you to make the changes all over again.

But they have fixed that since, now starting a pod is more from a live page where as GPU availability status changes it updates in realtime/if your deploy fails you just try again - your customised env vars etc are still there.

Plus they also addressed the GPU availability problem as something they're working to fix and it's understandable seeing as nobody can get their hands on GPUs atm.