Hugging Face Inference Providers free tier

What Hugging Face Inference Providers's free tier allows

Signed-in free users receive $0.10 in monthly Inference Provider credits (Hugging Face notes this is subject to change); PRO users receive $2.00 and Team or Enterprise organizations $2.00 per seat. Credits only apply to requests routed by Hugging Face, not to requests made with your own provider key. Once the monthly credits are spent you must purchase credits to continue.

Published limits

Published as a credit balance

Free access type

Provider free tier

Credit card

Not required

Protocol

OpenAI-compatible at https://router.huggingface.co/v1

Lifecycle

Active

Sources reviewed

2026-07-25

Hugging Face charges provider list rates with no markup, so the free allowance converts to very different request counts depending on which model you route to.

Where Hugging Face Inference Providers sits in this catalog

Hugging Face Inference Providers is one of 15 provider free tier entries among the 25 providers detailed here. It asks for no credit card, which is true of 23 of the 25. It publishes no fixed request count, as 16 of the 25 do not.

Models Hugging Face Inference Providers lists as free

• deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3-0324 — DeepSeek, also free at 4 other providers here
• openai/gpt-oss-120b — gpt-oss, also free at 9 other providers here
• 200+ models routed across partner providers — not part of any family this catalog tracks across providers

9 other providers here also host the gpt-oss family on free terms, and the terms are not the same: GroqCloud, SambaNova Cloud, Cloudflare Workers AI, Fireworks AI, Ollama Cloud, Cerebras Inference, Vercel AI Gateway, Together AI, Scaleway Generative APIs. 4 other providers here also host the DeepSeek family on free terms, and the terms are not the same: SambaNova Cloud, SiliconFlow, Nebius Token Factory, DeepInfra.

Checking a Hugging Face Inference Providers key

The CORS preflight allows any origin to send an Authorization header, so a browser can call this endpoint directly. That was measured against https://router.huggingface.co on 2026-07-25.

So a key can be checked in the browser checker without installing anything. If you would rather not paste a key into a web page, this does the same thing:

#!/usr/bin/env sh
set -eu

: "${HUGGINGFACE_API_KEY:?Set HUGGINGFACE_API_KEY to a key you created yourself at the provider console}"

# Prints the models this key can reach, then the HTTP status on its own line so
# 200, 401, and 429 stay distinguishable.
curl --silent --show-error \
  --write-out '\nHTTP %{http_code}\n' \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer $HUGGINGFACE_API_KEY" \
  'https://router.huggingface.co/v1/models'

Using a Hugging Face Inference Providers key

Hugging Face Inference Providers serves the OpenAI chat completions protocol at https://router.huggingface.co/v1. Point any client that accepts a custom base URL at it, and let the client read the key from HUGGINGFACE_API_KEY so the value never lands in a config file:

# Merge this snippet into ~/.codex/config.toml.
# Project-level config cannot select a custom model provider.
model = "deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3-0324"
model_provider = "huggingface"

[model_providers.huggingface]
name = "Hugging Face Inference Providers OpenAI-compatible gateway"
base_url = "https://router.huggingface.co/v1"
env_key = "HUGGINGFACE_API_KEY"
wire_api = "responses"

Questions about the Hugging Face Inference Providers free tier

Does Hugging Face Inference Providers ask for a credit card?

No. Hugging Face Inference Providers is one of 23 providers here that hand out free access without a card, so the only cost of trying it is the signup.

What are Hugging Face Inference Providers's free-tier rate limits?

Hugging Face Inference Providers publishes no single free-tier number: its limits are published as a credit balance. This catalog leaves that blank rather than guessing a figure.

What happens when a Hugging Face Inference Providers key hits the limit?

The endpoint answers 429. That is a statement about the request that was refused, not about how much quota is left; only a reset header from the provider tells you when it clears.

Is the Hugging Face Inference Providers free tier going away?

Nothing in Hugging Face Inference Providers's own documentation says so as of 2026-07-25. Hugging Face charges provider list rates with no markup, so the free allowance converts to very different request counts depending on which model you route to.

Can Hugging Face Inference Providers be used with Codex, Cline, or Continue?

Yes. Hugging Face Inference Providers serves the OpenAI chat completions protocol at https://router.huggingface.co/v1, so any client that accepts a custom base URL can use it. Claude Code is the exception, because it speaks the Anthropic protocol instead.

Official sources

• Inference Providers pricing and billinghttps://huggingface.co/docs/inference-providers/pricing
• Inference Providers OpenAI compatibilityhttps://huggingface.co/docs/inference-providers/index
• Inference Providers settingshttps://huggingface.co/settings/inference-providers

Every figure above was read from those pages on 2026-07-25. Where a provider states a limit only inside a console, this catalog records that fact instead of a number. See the methodology for how an entry gets in and how it gets corrected.