Hugging Face Spaces (CPU Basic)
Sibling records disagree:
- identity_kind:
compute/huggingface-spacessays email, compute/huggingface-spaces-cpu-basic says card - verdict:
compute/huggingface-spacessays qualifies-with-caveat, compute/huggingface-spaces-cpu-basic says paid-only
- Free allowance
- CPU Basic is listed at 2 vCPU / 16 GB for FREE, but creating a Gradio or Docker Space requires a paid plan; a free account may host up to 2 Gradio Spaces on ZeroGPU instead
- Verdict
- paidno free allowance; listed for its price
- Cost
- free tierpaid plans from USD 9/month
- Identity
- cardcard required, no phone
- Binding limit
- write-gatedPRO at USD 9 a month to create a Gradio or Docker Space on a personal account
- Evidence
- documented7 sources; a first-party page was read and the sentence quoted
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-11-25checked 2026-10-25 (live); stale on 2026-11-25
| Free tier | CPU Basic is listed at 2 vCPU / 16 GB for FREE, but creating a Gradio or Docker Space requires a paid plan; a free account may host up to 2 Gradio Spaces on ZeroGPU instead unit hours; metered on wall-clock; The hardware is free on the price list; the right to create a compute Space is not. |
|---|---|
| Price | none stated |
| Limits |
this record exists so the free hardware row is not mistaken for a free machine |
| Binding | write-gated the gate is a person paying USD 9, not a counter; the hardware would be free if the Space could be created |
| Identity | card a free account gets static Spaces; a Gradio or Docker Space needs PRO at USD 9 a month, so a card is the price of any compute Space. The ZeroGPU exception needs a verified email and an account older than 30 days. |
| Egress | no egress allowance published for Spaces |
| Per-object cap | not applicable: the unit is a session, not an object |
| Retention | 50 GB of disk per Space, explicitly 'not persistent'; a Space sleeps after inactivity and rebuilds from the repo |
| Interface | ssh the Space URL over HTTPS |
| Tooling | the Space SDK; git push to the Space repository |
| Composes with | none on a free account: the create step is gated |
| Reliability | a free-hardware Space sleeps after inactivity and wakes on request, so the first visitor after a quiet period waits for a cold start |
| Notes | This is the sharpest price-list trap: the hardware row says FREE and the same page's docs say a paid plan is required to use it. A reader who only reads the price table gets it wrong. |
| Evidence note | documented the plan gate, the shape and the disk are quoted from the Spaces docs today, and the price list agrees that CPU Basic is FREE. The two pages together are the finding. |
| Parsed numbers |
|
Evidence 7
| date | source | what it proved |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-22 | huggingface.co/docs/hub/en/spaces-overview | CPU Basic is listed as 2 vCPU / 16 GB at FREE, while creating a Gradio or Docker Space requires a paid plan |
| 2026-10-22 | huggingface.co/docs/hub/en/spaces-overview | Static Spaces are free for everyone; Gradio and Docker Spaces need PRO for personal accounts |
| 2026-10-24 | huggingface.co/docs/hub/en/spaces-overview | quoted: 'Static Spaces are free for everyone. Gradio and Docker Spaces run on compute and require a paid plan to create: PRO for personal accounts, Team or Enterprise for organizations.' |
| 2026-10-24 | huggingface.co/docs/hub/en/spaces-overview | quoted: 'Each Spaces environment is limited to 16GB RAM, 2 CPU cores and 50GB of (not persistent) disk space by default.' |
| 2026-10-24 | huggingface.co/docs/hub/en/spaces-overview | quoted: 'The default CPU Basic hardware has no hourly cost, but creating a Space that runs on compute (Gradio or Docker) requires a paid plan, while Static Spaces are free for everyone.' |
| 2026-10-24 | huggingface.co/pricing | quoted exactly, including the page's escaped hyphens: '| CPU Basic | 2 vCPU | 16 GB | \- | \- | FREE |' |
| 2026-10-24 | huggingface.co/pricing | quoted: 'Upgrade your HF experience for $9/month.' — the PRO price that the compute-Space gate costs |
More fields 14
{
"shape": {
"vcpu": 2,
"ram_gib": 16,
"disk_gib": 50,
"gpu_class": null,
"gpu_count": null,
"note": "vendor states 16GB and 50GB in decimal; kept as stated"
},
"billing_model": "free",
"session_cap": {
"wall_clock_min": null,
"idle_reap_s": null,
"restart_required": false,
"note": "no session cap; sleeps on inactivity and wakes on request"
},
"keep_rate": null,
"persistent_storage": null,
"network_out": {
"allow_outbound": true,
"allow_inbound_listen": true,
"ports": "one https endpoint per Space",
"static_ip": false,
"ipv6": false,
"per_session_bytes": null
},
"free_tier_kind": "feature-gated",
"term": "none",
"m10h_usd": 9.0,
"m24h_usd": 9.0,
"price_arithmetic": "USD 9.00 a month for PRO, which is the flat cost of the right to create one compute Space; the hardware itself is USD 0.00",
"unattended": true,
"unattended_mechanism": "a Space runs as a server and stays up while it has traffic; it is a daemon, not a job, and sleeps when idle",
"units": "RAM and disk are quoted in the vendor's own decimal GB, not GiB. The ram_gib and disk_gib keys carry the vendor's number unconverted, so where a vendor writes 30 GB the key holds 30 and the true value is about 27.9 GiB. No conversion was performed."
}