Yes, Hugging Face has a permanent free tier alongside its paid plans. FreeTier.co estimates the free tier at about $9.00/mo, and no credit card is required to sign up.
About
Hugging Face is an AI collaboration platform where the machine learning community builds, shares, and discovers models, datasets, and applications. It provides a central hub for experimentation, deployment, and collaboration across a wide range of machine learning workflows.
The platform supports public and private repositories, application hosting, dataset exploration, and model access through a unified ecosystem. It also includes enterprise-oriented capabilities for teams that need security, governance, and managed collaboration at scale.
- Model hosting and discovery across a large public catalog
- Dataset sharing and collaboration tools for machine learning teams
- Spaces for building and publishing AI applications and demos
- Enterprise features for access control, auditability, and team management
- Compute and inference offerings for deploying and running ML workloads
Free Tier Value
This free tier is genuinely usable, with hosted Hub access, public repositories, and free Spaces compute, so it has meaningful ongoing value rather than a short trial. The closest paid entry point is Pro at $9/month, and the free offering covers a large share of the practical experience but with caps and fewer premium controls, so it lands at about the full entry-plan price but not above it. A credit card is not required, which lowers friction, but the presence of compute and hosting limits keeps it from being treated as an uncapped plan.
What's included in the free tier
Verified
- Access to the HF Hub for exploring, experimenting, collaborating, and building ML projects.
- Model evaluation tools for creating and testing ML models.
- Dataset Viewer for browsing and inspecting public datasets.
- Git-based collaboration for versioned teamwork on repositories.
- Community learning and sharing through experimentation with the HF community.
- Personal ML profile for showcasing your work and portfolio.
See Hugging Face pricing for current limits.
Paid plans
Pro
- private storage capacity
- 10×
- public storage capacity
- 2×
- inference credits
- 20× included
- ZeroGPU quota
- 8×
- price
- $9/month
- 10× private storage capacity
- 2× public storage capacity
- 20× included inference credits
- 8× ZeroGPU quota and highest queue priority
- Host ZeroGPU, Gradio & Docker Spaces
- Spaces Dev Mode
- Personal blog publishing
- Dataset Viewer for private datasets
Team
- price
- $20/user/month
- members
- all organization members get ZeroGPU and Inference Providers PRO benefits
- SSO support (SAML & OIDC)
- Data location control with Storage Regions
- Detailed action reviews with Audit Logs
- Granular access control via Resource Groups
- Repository usage Analytics
- Advanced auth policies and repository visibility controls
- Centralized token control and approvals
- Dataset Viewer for private datasets
Enterprise
- price
- $50/user/month
- All benefits from the Team plan
- Highest storage, bandwidth, and API rate limits
- Automated user management with SCIM provisioning
- Advanced security and access controls
- Managed billing with annual commitments
- Legal and Compliance processes
- Dedicated support
Pricing extracted from Hugging Face's pricing page. Always verify current pricing before committing.
Common questions
Is Hugging Face free forever?
Yes. Hugging Face has a permanent free tier alongside its paid plans, though the allowance typically resets each month.
Does Hugging Face require a credit card?
No. You can start on Hugging Face's free tier without entering card details.
What happens when you exceed Hugging Face's free tier?
You move to a paid plan. Hugging Face's cheapest paid plan is Pro at $9 / month.
What is Hugging Face's free tier worth?
Hugging Face's free tier is worth about $9.00 per month. That maps to an FTV score of 59/100. The FTV score is explained at freetier.co/ftv.