Hugging Face · Free LLM router
EndedHugging Face Inference Providers free credits (discontinued)
Ended: since 7 October 2026 Hugging Face's pricing docs say free accounts get no monthly Inference Providers credit — free users must buy credits. PRO ($9/month) still includes $2.00 of monthly compute credits.
Last verified Official source (opens in a new tab) huggingface.co
Key facts
- Free value
- $0
- Details
- No included credit for free accounts. The former $0.10/month is historical.
- Credit card required
- Card required
- Availability
- Ended
Free accounts no longer receive monthly Inference Providers credits. Paid-plan credits are a separate benefit.
- Application deadline
- No deadline stated
- Credit validity
- The free monthly allowance has ended; there is no current free balance.
- Eligibility
- No longer available. Hugging Face's docs listed a monthly credit for every free account until they were changed on 7 October 2026.
What you get
Nothing for free accounts any more. Hugging Face's Inference Providers pricing table now reads "Free Users | None | - | yes (credits purchase required)", and the docs say "Free users can use Inference Providers by purchasing credits, or by upgrading to PRO". The change was made in Hugging Face's own documentation on 7 October 2026 (huggingface/hub-docs PR #2865, "free users no longer get included monthly credits"). PRO accounts ($9/month) and Team/Enterprise seats still get $2.00 a month, and those included credits are now general-purpose compute credits usable across Hugging Face's compute services — a benefit of a paid plan, not a free offer, so we do not list it.
Access and next steps
- This offer has ended — free Hugging Face accounts no longer receive monthly Inference Providers credits
- To use Inference Providers now, buy credits (Hugging Face says compute services are paid by credit card) or subscribe to PRO
Verification history and earlier terms
This dated editorial record includes superseded conditions. Use the current facts above for eligibility and access.
The free monthly credit is small ($0.10) and Hugging Face notes it is 'subject to change' — re-verify on a tight cadence (V19). Re-verified 2026-07-03: $0.10/month (Free) and $2.00/month (PRO) unchanged, still flagged 'subject to change'. Credits do not apply when using your own custom provider API key. Re-verified 2026-08-15 (V19, tight cadence): the pricing table is unchanged — Free Users '$0.10, subject to change', PRO Users '$2.00', Team or Enterprise Organizations '$2.00 per seat'. Extra usage on a free account still requires purchasing credits. Re-verified 2026-09-13 (V19, the ≤2-week cadence row): unchanged — the pricing table still reads "$0.10, subject to change" for Free Users and "$2.00" for PRO, with Team/Enterprise at "$2.00 per seat". Free users' credits remain spendable on Inference Providers only. WITHDRAWN 2026-10-10 (sweep #5, V19), adversarially re-verified the same day. huggingface.co/docs/inference-providers/pricing (server-rendered) now reads "Account Type | Monthly Credits | Can be spent on | Extra usage (pay-as-you-go)" with "Free Users | None | - | yes (credits purchase required)" and "PRO Users | $2.00 | All Hugging Face compute services | yes"; "0.10" and "subject to change" have zero hits in the page, its .md twin and inference-providers/llms-full.txt. The page also says "Free users can use Inference Providers by purchasing credits, or by upgrading to PRO". The change is dated by Hugging Face's own docs repo: huggingface/hub-docs commit c708a9e9fd2ba53fefc8fad13ff1a9780a838c42 (PR #2865, merged 2026-10-07T12:31:20Z), message "docs(inference-providers): free users no longer get included monthly credits", which changed the Free Users row from "$0.10, subject to change" to "None" and removed 'free tier' wording from six docs files. expiry is set to that merge date because it is the only dated primary evidence of when the credit ended; it dates the documentation change, not necessarily the product change, and the copy says so. Card: huggingface.co/docs/hub/billing says "Hugging Face compute services are paid by credit card", and the cloud-marketplace alternative "is available for organizations only", so a free personal account cannot use Inference Providers without a card — cardRequired true. PRO ($9/month, $2 of included inference credits) confirmed on huggingface.co/pricing and /pro. The record is kept as an expired entry rather than deleted so readers who arrive looking for the free credit learn that it ended. Re-verified 2026-10-21 in the audit-remediation source sweep: current primary offer page and the material eligibility, validity, unit and payment evidence recorded in SOURCE-VERIFICATION.csv. Historical notes above are retained as history, not current terms. No account was created and no claim was submitted.