#
Pricing and Billing

Access 200+ models from leading AI inference providers with centralized, transparent, pay-as-you-go pricing. No infrastructure management required—just pay for what you use, with no markup from Hugging Face.

##
Free Credits to Get Started

Every Hugging Face user receives monthly credits to experiment with Inference Providers:

Account Type | Monthly Credits | Extra usage (pay-as-you-go)
--- | --- | ---
Free Users | $0.10, subject to change | no
PRO Users | $2.00 | yes
Team or Enterprise Organizations | $2.00 per seat | yes

> Your monthly credits automatically apply when you route requests through Hugging Face. For Team or Enterprise organizations, credits are shared among all members.

##
How Billing Works: Choose Your Approach

Inference Providers offers flexibility in how you’re billed. Understanding these options upfront helps you choose the best approach for your needs:

Feature | Routed by Hugging Face | Custom Provider Key
--- | --- | ---
How it Works | Your request routes through HF to the provider | You set a custom provider key in HF settings
Billing | Pay-as-you-go on your HF account | Billed directly by the provider
Monthly Credits | ✅ Yes - Credits apply to eligible providers | ❌ No - Credits don’t apply
Provider Account Needed | ❌ No - We handle everything | ✅ Yes - You need provider accounts
Best For | Simplicity, experimentation, consolidated billing | More billing control, using non-integrated providers
Integration | SDKs, Playground, widgets, Data AI Studio | SDKs, Playground, widgets, Data AI Studio

###
Which Option Should I Choose?

- Start with Routed by Hugging Face if you want simplicity and to use your monthly credits
- Use Custom Provider Key if you need specific provider features or you’re consistently using the same provider

##
Pay-as-you-Go Details

To benefit from Enterprise Hub included credits, you need to explicitly specify the organization to be billed when performing the inference requests. See the Organization Billing section below for more details.

PRO users and Enterprise Hub organizations can continue using the API after exhausting their monthly credits. This ensures uninterrupted access to models for production workloads.

> Hugging Face charges you the same rates as the provider, with no additional fees. We just pass through the provider costs directly.

You can track your spending anytime on your billing page.

##
Hugging Face Billing vs Custom Provider Key (Detailed Comparison)

The documentation above assumes you are making routed requests to external providers. In practice, there are 2 different ways to run inference, each with unique billing implications:

- Hugging Face Routed Requests: This is the default method for using Inference Providers. Simply use the JavaScript or Python `InferenceClient`, or make raw HTTP requests with your Hugging Face User Access Token. Your request is automatically routed through Hugging Face to the provider’s platform. No separate provider account is required, and billing is managed directly by Hugging Face. This approach lets you seamlessly switch between providers without additional setup.

- Custom Provider Key: You can bring your own provider key to use with the Inference Providers. This is useful if you already have an account with a provider and you want to use it with the Inference Providers. Hugging Face won’t charge you for the call.

Here is a table that sums up what we’ve seen so far:

| HF routing | Billed by | Free-tier included | Pay-as-you-go | Integration
--- | --- | --- | --- | --- | ---
Routed Requests | Yes | Hugging Face | Yes | Only for PRO users and for integrated providers | SDKs, Playground, widgets, Data AI Studio
Custom Provider Key | Yes | Provider | No | Yes | SDKs, Playground, widgets, Data AI Studio

> You can set your custom provider key in the settings page on the Hub, or in the `InferenceClient` when using the JavaScript or Python SDKs. When making a routed request with a custom key, your code remains unchanged—you can still pass your Hugging Face User Access Token. Hugging Face will automatically swap the authentication when routing the request.

##
HF-Inference cost

As you may have noticed, you can select to work with `"hf-inference"` provider. This service used to be called “Inference API (serverless)” prior to Inference Providers. From a user point of view, working with HF Inference is the same as with any other provider. Past the free-tier credits, you get charged for every inference request based on the compute time x price of the underlying hardware.

For instance, a request to black-forest-labs/FLUX.1-dev that takes 10 seconds to complete on a GPU machine that costs $0.00012 per second to run, will be billed $0.0012.

As of July 2025, hf-inference focuses mostly on CPU inference (e.g. embedding, text-ranking, text-classification, or smaller LLMs that have historical importance like BERT or GPT-2).

##
Billing for Team and Enterprise organizations

For Enterprise Hub organizations, it is possible to centralize billing for all of your users. Each user still uses their own User Access Token but the requests are billed to your organization. This can be done by passing `"X-HF-Bill-To: my-org-name"` as a header in your HTTP requests.

Enterprise Hub organizations receive a pool of free usage credits based on the number of seats in the subscription. Inference Providers usage can be tracked on the organization’s billing page. Enterprise Hub organization administrators can also set a spending limit and disable a set of Inference Providers from the organization’s settings.

huggingface_hub
openai
requests

To bill your organization, use the `bill_to` parameter when initializing the client.

    from huggingface_hub import InferenceClient

    client = InferenceClient(bill_to="my-org-name")

    completion = client.chat.completions.create(
        model="deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3-0324",
        messages=[
            {
                "role": "user",
                "content": "How many 'G's in 'huggingface'?"
            }
        ],
    )

    print(completion.choices[0].message)

Similarily in JavaScript:

huggingface.js
openai
fetch

If you are using the JavaScript `InferenceClient`, you can set the `billTo` attribute at a client level to bill your organization.

    import { InferenceClient } from "@huggingface/inference";

    const client = new InferenceClient(process.env.HF_TOKEN, { billTo: "my-org-name" });

    const completion = await client.chat.completions.create({
      model: "deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3-0324",
      messages: [
        {
          role: "user",
          content: "How many 'G's in 'huggingface'?",
        },
      ],
    });

    console.log(completion.choices[0].message.content);

Update on GitHub