What's free
Free CPU Basic + ZeroGPU for Spaces; Inference Providers has no included credit on the Free plan (credits must be purchased) — $2.00/mo is included only on PRO/Team/Enterprise
- Credit card
- not required
- Phone verification
- not confirmed
- Commercial use
- not confirmed
Free limits
Numeric limits are not recorded in structured form for this provider.
In the provider's words
No RPM/TPM published, only credit amounts
The catch
Credits only apply with "Routed by Hugging Face" billing, not with a Custom Provider Key
Free models: not listed yet.
Quickstart — chat completions
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(base_url="https://router.huggingface.co/v1", api_key="<YOUR_FREE_API_KEY>")
resp = client.chat.completions.create(
model="<a-free-model>",
messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Hello!"}],
)
print(resp.choices[0].message.content)…or with curl:
curl https://router.huggingface.co/v1/chat/completions \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"model":"<a-free-model>","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Hello!"}]}'Appears in
Free LLM APIs with no credit cardOpenAI-compatible free LLM APIsFree multimodal LLM APIsNo credit cardOpenAI-compatibleEmbeddings / RAGSpeech (STT/TTS)Image generation
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Change history
How this free tier has changed since we started tracking it (2026-07-30) — generated from the git history of providers.json.
- 2026-10-08 Updated free tier
- 2026-07-30 Updated card requirement
- 2026-07-30 Added to the hub