You built a model or a script and want to show it, but deploying a demo means cloud accounts, domains and bills. Hugging Face Spaces removes all three - at the price of a few limits you should know before you start.

📜 Table of Contents

• What Spaces Is
• What the Free Tier Gives You
• Five Minutes to a Gradio Demo
• Gradio or Streamlit
• Secrets, Not Hardcoded Keys
• FAQ
• Related

Hugging Face Spaces 2026: Host AI Demos for Free With Gradio and Streamlit

You built a model or a script and want to show it, but deploying a demo means cloud accounts, domains and bills. Spaces removes all three.

What Spaces Is

A git repo plus an app file. Hugging Face builds it, serves it at user-space.hf.space with HTTPS. No server, no credit card for a public Space.

Good for: model demos, internal prototypes, clickable examples in articles. Not for production traffic or sensitive data.

What the Free Tier Gives You

Quotas change; check official pricing before you rely on numbers.

Five Minutes to a Gradio Demo

1. New Space, SDK Gradio, free CPU, Public.
2. app.py:

import gradio as gr

def summarize(text):
    if not text.strip():
        return "Please enter text"
    return text.strip()[:300] + "..."

demo = gr.Interface(fn=summarize,
                    inputs=gr.Textbox(lines=6, label="Text"),
                    outputs=gr.Textbox(lines=4, label="Summary"),
                    examples=[["Put one real example here so visitors can click."]])
demo.launch()

1. requirements.txt with pinned versions only.
2. README.md YAML header: title, emoji, sdk: gradio, app_file: app.py.
3. Watch the build logs - most failures are dependency conflicts or a wrong app_file.

Gradio or Streamlit

One feature: Gradio. A small clickable tool: Streamlit.

Secrets, Not Hardcoded Keys

Public Spaces are public. Put API keys in Space Secrets and read them from environment variables. Locally use .env and gitignore it.

FAQ

Space stuck loading? Likely asleep (cold start) or build failure - read Logs.

Can it run a 7B model? Barely on free CPU. Use ZeroGPU quotas or an external API; keep weights on the Hub.

Custom domain? Spaces use hf.space subdomains; front it with your own proxy if needed.

Commercial use? Platform terms and model licences are separate. Check the model card.

Production backend? No - rate limits and sleeping break real traffic.

Note: quotas and policies follow Hugging Face's official pricing page and docs.

Related

• llama.cpp optimisation tips
• Running Ollama locally on a Mac