Hugging Face free tier includes ML model hub… Verified October 2026. Compare with 31 alternatives in AI / ML.
Why caution: effective 2026-10-07 — Hugging Face stopped giving free accounts included monthly Inference Providers credits; free users now have to buy credits or upgrade to PRO to call Inference Providers. Source ↗ Full history ↓
A verdict here is not a fixed property of the vendor. A one-off pricing event demotes a vendor while its recorded date falls in the last 180 days and then lapses on its own, with nothing about the vendor having changed; a standing condition — a free tier withdrawn and not restored, a product retired — does not lapse with time. This one rests on a record effective 2026-10-07, so it lapses on 2027-04-06 unless we record something new first.
Subtypes in AI / ML: model_gateway — one endpoint that reaches models run by several independent providers; what is sold is the routing, key management and fallback, not the weights; model_hosting — you supply or select a model and the platform serves it behind an endpoint on hardware you choose. We read that on 2026-09-01 from https://huggingface.co/docs/inference-providers/pricing, where it says: “Inference Endpoints (dedicated)” How we use this.
Hugging Face's free tier offers ML model hub… We rate it caution — one recorded limit reduction, on 2026-10-07. Best for ai / ml workloads — 31 alternatives available.
ML model hub. Since 2026-10-07, free accounts get no included Inference Providers credits: free users buy credits or upgrade to PRO to call Inference Providers, which serves 200+ models. PRO ($9/month) gets $2.00 a month. Free accounts get 100GB of private storage and best-effort public storage; substantial storage needs PRO, Team or Enterprise.
Hugging Face runs its own MCP server. "The Hugging Face MCP (Model Context Protocol) Server connects your MCP‑compatible AI assistant (for example Codex, Cursor, VS Code extensions, Zed, ChatGPT or Claude Desktop) directly to the Hugging Face Hub." (From https://huggingface.co/docs/hub/en/hf-mcp-server, read 2026-10-20.) The endpoint is https://huggingface.co/mcp, the transport is HTTP, and authentication uses your Hugging Face account, through the client configuration that https://huggingface.co/settings/mcp generates.
We read that on 2026-10-30 from https://huggingface.co/docs/inference-providers/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names Hugging Face as "hugging face" and states "$2.00".
How Hugging Face compares against every one of the 31 we list, not against a selection of them. A surface with room for every member of a tied set may rotate their order. A surface with room for only some of them names none of them, because which ones it named would be the claim, and a claim seeded on the date is not the one we serve tomorrow. How we decide this.
| Service | Free Tier | Stability |
|---|---|---|
| Hugging Face | Free | caution |
| NVIDIA NIM | Free Free inference endpoints on build.nvidia.com: models marked Free Endpoint, including DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, GLM 5.3 Flash, gpt-oss-20b, Gemma 4 31B and NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra, can be called at no cost. Their model IDs are deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4.1-flash, z-ai/glm-5.3-flash, openai/gpt-oss-20b,… |
stable |
| Google Gemini API | Free (Reduced) Free tier: Gemini 4 Hydrogen, Gemini 3.8 Flash, 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, 3.1 Flash-Lite, Gemini 3 Flash Preview, Gemini Embedding 2 and Gemma 4 are free of charge. Also free of charge are Gemini 3.8 Live (real-time voice), Gemini 3.5 Live Translate (translation), Gemini 3.5 Transcribe… |
stable |
| Keywords AI | Free Rebranded to Respan; keywordsai.co redirects to respan.ai. Free plan: full platform, 100k logs, 1k scores, 5 datasets, 2 evaluators, 5 prompts. |
source unconfirmed |
| Cohere | Free AI model API for Command chat models, Embed, Rerank, Transcribe and Parse. Every account starts with a Trial API key: calls made with it are free and limited to 1,000 API calls a month. |
stable |
| Modal | Free Serverless platform for running CPU and GPU workloads. The Starter plan has no monthly fee and includes $30 of compute per month (GPU, CPU and memory), 3 workspace seats, 100 containers and 10 GPU concurrency. |
caution |
| Maxim AI | Free Simulate, evaluate, and observe your AI agents — The 'OSS' tier is free forever for developers, small teams, and self-managed deployments. It includes features like a drop-in replacement, OTel compatibility, metrics & traces, built-in observability, budget management, and more. |
stable |
| Lumenfall.ai | Free AI media gateway: one OpenAI-compatible API to image and video generation models from several providers, billed at each provider's price with no markup, platform fee or subscription. One model, FLUX.1 [schnell] FP8, is listed free per image ("Free to try", served through Fireworks AI). |
stable |
| LLM7.io | Free LLM inference gateway. With a free token from dash.llm7.io: 1 request a second, 60 a minute, 250 an hour and 100,000 tokens per 24 hours, counting input and output tokens; LLM7 says free quotas may be reduced without notice. |
caution |
| Roboflow | Free Computer vision platform for labeling, training and deploying models. On September 18, 2026 Roboflow announced a free tier for its Core plan: 10 credits that refresh every month, private projects and models, and model weight download. |
caution |
| Hetzner Inference API | Free Hetzner's experimental Inference API: an OpenAI-compatible API for open-weight models, free while it stays experimental. Base URL: https://inference.hetzner.com/api/v1. |
stable |
| paperspace | Free ML platform (Gradient Notebooks, Workflows and Deployments) from Paperspace, now part of DigitalOcean. The Free plan is $0 with public projects, 5 GB of storage and free machines for Notebooks in your private workspace (Free CPU C4 and Free GPU M4000; free machines shut down after at most 6 hours). |
stable |
| Groq | Free Fast LLM inference on Groq's LPU hardware. Free plan: gpt-oss-20b, gpt-oss-120b and Qwen3.8 27B, each at 30 requests a minute, 1,000 requests and 200,000 tokens a day, plus Whisper speech-to-text at 2,000 requests a day. |
caution |
| OpenRouter | Free AI model router. Free plan: 50 requests a day, no BYOK. |
stable |
| Cloudflare Workers AI | Free Workers AI runs AI models on Cloudflare's global network. Every account gets 10,000 Neurons per day at no charge, reset daily at 00:00 UTC; on the Workers Free plan, requests beyond that fail until the reset. |
caution |
| Pollinations.AI | Free Keyless Classic API: one image model and GPT-OSS 20B text, free, no sign-up, rate-limited per IP. Every other model needs an API key and Pollen, and free Pollen comes only from quests. |
caution |
| Portkey | Free Control panel for Gen AI apps featuring an observability suite & an AI gateway. Send & log up to 10,000 requests for free every month. |
unrated |
| Zhipu AI | Free China-based GLM model API. The price list marks these models free: GLM-4.7-Flash, GLM-4-Flash-250414 and GLM-Z1-Flash (text); GLM-4.6V-Flash, GLM-4V-Flash and GLM-4.1V-Thinking-Flash (vision); CogView-3-Flash (image); CogVideoX-Flash (video). |
source unconfirmed |
| SiliconFlow | Free Pay-as-you-go model inference. siliconflow.cn, run by a Beijing company, lists these models at no charge: the chat models Qwen3-8B, Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct (Free), Qwen3.5-4B, GLM-4-9B-0414, GLM-Z1-9B-0414, DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B (Free) and Xing4.0-29B; the translation model Hunyuan-MT-7B; the OCR… |
unrated |
| Fireworks AI | Free Credits Inference platform for open models, with serverless per-token pricing and on-demand GPU deployments billed per GPU second. Fireworks offers $1 in free credits to get started. |
unrated |
| Replicate | Trial ML model hosting and inference. A new account can run the models in Replicate's Try for Free collection without buying credit, for a limited number of runs that Replicate does not state; after that you add billing and buy credit. |
stable |
| Baseten | Basic (Free Credits) ML model deployment platform. New workspaces receive credits for testing and deployment; Baseten does not state the amount. |
unrated |
| Cerebras | Trial Ultra-fast LLM inference API — no permanent free tier. New accounts get $5 in free credits after adding a verified payment method, expiring 30 days after they are granted. |
risky |
| Ollama Cloud | Pay-as-you-go Cloud-hosted Ollama for running open-source LLMs. Between October 26 and 27, 2026, Ollama replaced its Free plan, which included starter usage credits, with a $0 Pay as you go plan. |
unrated |
| OpenAI | Pay-as-you-go AI API platform. One model is priced Free in OpenAI's own table: the moderation model omni-moderation-latest. |
unrated |
| Anthropic API | Pay-as-you-go Claude API with usage-based pricing per million tokens (input/output). Claude Fable 5.2 $8/$40. |
unrated |
| MiniMax | Pay-as-you-go MiniMax sells API access pay-as-you-go on platform.minimax.io. Its pricing pages list no free API allowance; one docs page mentions a free quota for new pay-as-you-go users but gives no amount. |
unrated |
| Together AI | Pay-as-you-go Inference API for open-source models, billed per token. Together AI does not currently offer free trials; access requires a minimum $15 credit purchase for an organization's first purchase ($5 for later purchases), and the platform is fully prepaid. |
unrated |
| DeepSeek API | Pay-as-you-go Pay-as-you-go LLM API with no free tier, billed from a prepaid balance. DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash (deepseek-flash): $0.30/M input, $1.20/M output at peak. |
unrated |
| xAI | Pay-as-you-go Grok API, pay as you go: sign up at console.x.ai, then load it with credits. grok-4.7 $2.00/$6.00 (per 1M tokens, under 200k prompt tokens). |
unrated |
| GitHub Models | Retired GitHub retired GitHub Models on 2026-07-30, so there is no free tier. GitHub's own documentation states "GitHub Models has been retired." |
source unconfirmed |
| Mistral AI | Pay-as-you-go Since about 2026-11-05, Mistral's Free plan covers Vibe and Studio and does not include API access. Creating API keys and calling the API require billing activation and pay-as-you-go with prepaid credits. |
unrated |
Left out of this list: Brave Search API (shares no subtype with this product), Pinecone (shares no subtype with this product), Qdrant (shares no subtype with this product), Deepgram (shares no subtype with this product), Kaggle (shares no subtype with this product), Scale AI (shares no subtype with this product), AssemblyAI (shares no subtype with this product), Weights & Biases (shares no subtype with this product), Comet ML (shares no subtype with this product), Clarifai (we have not classified this record), Neptune.ai (we have not classified this record), Labelbox (shares no subtype with this product), Google Colab (shares no subtype with this product), Composio (shares no subtype with this product), DeepAR (none of this category's subtypes apply), OCR.Space (shares no subtype with this product), Parseur (shares no subtype with this product), Reducto (shares no subtype with this product), SerpApi (shares no subtype with this product), Tavily AI (shares no subtype with this product), Arize AX (shares no subtype with this product), Audio Enhancer (none of this category's subtypes apply), Braintrust (shares no subtype with this product), Clair (none of this category's subtypes apply), Langfuse (shares no subtype with this product), LangSmith (shares no subtype with this product), Langtrace (we have not classified this record), LangWatch (shares no subtype with this product), Mediaworkbench.ai (none of this category's subtypes apply), Othor AI (none of this category's subtypes apply), ReportGPT (none of this category's subtypes apply), Zenable (none of this category's subtypes apply), Exa (shares no subtype with this product), GPU-Bridge (we have not classified this record), Google Vertex AI Agent Engine (we have not classified this record), Google Vector Search 2.0 (shares no subtype with this product), Google Gemini Embedding 2 (shares no subtype with this product), Alibaba Cloud Qwen Code (none of this category's subtypes apply), E2B (shares no subtype with this product), ElevenLabs (we have not classified this record), Stability AI (we have not classified this record), Daytona (shares no subtype with this product), Blaxel (shares no subtype with this product), Novita Sandbox (shares no subtype with this product), Runloop (shares no subtype with this product), Mem0 (shares no subtype with this product), Zep (shares no subtype with this product), Letta (we have not classified this record), Supermemory (shares no subtype with this product), Cognee (shares no subtype with this product), Serper (shares no subtype with this product), Linkup (shares no subtype with this product), Parallel (shares no subtype with this product), Jina AI (shares no subtype with this product), You.com (shares no subtype with this product), Cloudflare AI Search (we have not classified this record), Valyu (shares no subtype with this product). Each is still listed in AI / ML, with the vendor's own words we read that from on its page. How we decide this.
We do not push notifications. Every change we record is readable the moment it lands, and the JSON answer carries an ETag — send it back as If-None-Match and an unchanged answer costs one 304.
curl https://agentdeals.dev/api/changes?vendor=Hugging%20Face
curl https://agentdeals.dev/pricing-changes/feed.xml?vendor=Hugging%20Face