I want to buy a $9 membership, but…?
Is there a usage limit, or is it the same as the token system?
Because I read the features and didn’t see anything that mentioned that.
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Information might be scattered and hard to gather…
If you’re unsure, ask Hugging Face: website@huggingface.co
Free vs PRO ($9/month) on Hugging Face
The quick summary
- Free: great for downloading/using open models + light usage of hosted features.
- PRO: more quota + higher limits, and (importantly) some services keep working after the included credits.
Side-by-side (most practical differences)
| What you care about | Free | PRO |
|---|---|---|
| Inference Providers (API credits/month) | $0.10 | $2.00 (Hugging Face) |
| After credits run out (Inference Providers) | Stops (no pay-as-you-go) | Continues (pay-as-you-go) (Hugging Face) |
| ZeroGPU on Spaces (daily GPU time + priority) | 3.5 min/day, medium priority | 25 min/day, highest priority (Hugging Face) |
| Hub storage (private) | 100GB | 1TB included (+ pay-as-you-go above) (Hugging Face) |
| Hub storage (public) | Best-effort (often up to ~5TB for impactful work) | Up to 10TB included (Hugging Face) |
| Hub rate limits (typical API/download limits) | API: 1,000 / 5 min | API: 2,500 / 5 min (Hugging Face) |
What “usage limit” means (in plain terms)
1) If you’re calling models via Inference Providers (API)
This is a monthly $-credit system (not “unlimited tokens”):
- Free: $0.10/month, then you can’t keep going via HF billing.
- PRO: $2.00/month, then pay-as-you-go. (Hugging Face)
2) If you’re using Spaces ZeroGPU
This is a daily GPU-minutes quota:
- Free: 3.5 minutes/day
- PRO: 25 minutes/day
- Reset: 24 hours after your first GPU usage (Hugging Face)
About “8× vs 5× vs 7×”: the subscribe page currently says “8× daily usage quota” (Hugging Face), while the ZeroGPU docs also mention “x7 more” and show the concrete numbers (3.5 → 25 minutes/day ≈ 7.1×). (Hugging Face)
If you want the reliable answer: use the minutes/day.
PRO includes (non-quota features)
Examples from HF’s PRO page include Dev Mode, private dataset viewer, and early feature access. (Hugging Face)
Key takeaway
If your main goal is hosted inference/API, PRO is mostly about:
- a bit more included credit
- and pay-as-you-go so you don’t hit a hard stop (Hugging Face)
If your main goal is Spaces (ZeroGPU), PRO is mostly about:
- 25 minutes/day + highest priority. (Hugging Face)