Hugging Face Inference Providers
- Free allowance
- No monthly credits on a free account.
- Verdict
- paidno free allowance; listed for its price
- Cost
- no price stated
- Identity
- cardcard required, no phone
- Binding limit
- noneno named constraint binds
- Evidence
- documented3 sources; a first-party page was read and the sentence quoted
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-11-29checked 2026-10-29 (live); stale on 2026-11-29
| Free tier | no monthly credits on a free account. 'Free users can use Inference Providers by purchasing credits, or by upgrading to PRO'; monthly credits are granted to PRO and to Team or Enterprise organizations unit none; metered on none; the pricing doc's eligibility row reads 'Free Users: yes (credits purchase required)'. So the router is reachable to a free account and only by paying, which is the same shape as a paid-only product with a free door |
|---|---|
| Price | none stated |
| Limits |
the monthly credits granted to PRO, Team and Enterprise are shared among all members of an organisation and applied before any pay-as-you-go usage is billed; none of them is available to a free account |
| Binding | none no free allowance exists to bind: the free account can call the router only against purchased credits, so there is no ceiling on a free tier to name |
| Identity | card a Hugging Face account plus purchased credits, or a PRO subscription; a free account is refused by price rather than by key |
| Egress | not published |
| Interface | rest |
| Tooling | any OpenAI-compatible client |
| Composes with | pairs with an agent through the router; the scarce link is the monthly credit, and the 401-as-HTML shape means a body-classifying client fails before it reads the quota |
| Reliability | the router returns its 401 as an HTML document rather than JSON, so a probe that classifies on body shape mis-handles it |
| Notes | It does not: the pricing documentation grants monthly credits to PRO and to Team or Enterprise only, and a free user reaches the router by purchasing credits. The verdict moves from qualifies-with-caveat to paid-only. The 401-as-HTML finding stands and is unchanged. Hugging Face also sells Jobs containers in the compute topic on the same account. |
| Evidence note | documented the eligibility text, the monthly credit amounts per account type and the credit-application rule are quoted from the first-party Inference Providers pricing page; the router's HTML error body for an unauthenticated call is from a probe |
Evidence 3
| date | source | what it proved |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-22 | probe: https://router.huggingface.co/v1/chat/completions | an unauthenticated POST returned 401 with a 3087-byte body, an HTML document, not JSON. The endpoint exists and gates on a key; no key existed here, so no quota was read |
| 2026-10-22 | huggingface.co/docs/inference-providers/pricing | 'PRO users and Team or Enterprise organizations receive monthly credits to use with Inference Providers. Free users can use Inference Providers by purchasing credits, or by upgrading to PRO'; the eligibility table reads 'Free Users — yes (credits purchase required)' |
| 2026-10-28 | huggingface.co/docs/inference-providers/pricing | monthly Inference Providers credits go to PRO and Team or Enterprise accounts; a free user must purchase credits |
Unknown values 3
$.egress.meteredegress metering was not published$.per_object_cap.statedthe field does not apply to this kind of offer$.retention.statedthe field does not apply to this kind of offer