So, How Does Hugging Face Make Money?
With over five million users, Hugging Face is one of the most used platforms by AI engineers, developers, and builders. This is mainly because it offers access to almost every popular open-source model or framework. Apart from hosting over one million open-source models, over 4 lakh applications, and 2.5 lakh datasets, the platform offers distributed GPU services via ZeroGPU and features a thriving community of engineers, researchers, and enthusiasts. All of the offerings mentioned above are available for free. While some come with limited capabilities, others are unlimited. It allows users to host unlimited public models and datasets at no cost and enables them to create organisations and communities without any member limits. Source: Hugging Face Several people on social media have wondered how the platform makes money and generates revenue while continuing to offer services for free. Hugging Face has quietly become the biggest AI app store with 400,000 total apps, 2,000 new apps created every day, getting visited 2.5M times every week! Now you can search through any of them with AI or categories.The future of AI will be distributed, have fun everyone! pic.twitter.com/34FbvzceKL— clem 🤗 (@ClementDelangue) February 4, 2025 Furthermore, last year, the company committed to sharing $10 million worth of compute via the ZeroGPU initiative. However, Hugging Face has a straightforward, freemium business model like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. Hugging Face Thrives on a Freemium Business Model Hugging Face is profitable at the moment. The platform offers many paid services for enterprises and individuals who need higher usage limits. It offers a $9 monthly PRO subscription, which provides increased access to inference, compute, and storage. Furthermore, it offers a plan called Enterprise Hub, which starts at $20 per user, per month. Using this plan, organisations and enterprises can deploy their AI models, frameworks and applications on Hugging Face. This offers better security, ability to select the region where data is stored, priority customer support, and more features relevant to enterprises. The platform offers two virtual CPUs (vCPUs) and 16 GB of memory to deploy and host applications on Hugging Face Spaces for free. It then offers incremental upgrades starting at $0.03 per hour. Source: Hugging Face Besides, the platform offers paid access to cloud-based AI infrastructure from providers like AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and more, with an added cost, starting at $0.033 per hour. “We make good money via compute credits, Enterprise Hub, and Hugging Face Pro subscriptions. Business is good,” Vaibhav Srivastav, a senior official at Hugging Face, said. “More than a million enterprises, startups and developers of enterprises depend on it.” The platform’s enterprise hub is used by companies such as Mercedes-Benz, IBM, and Deutsche Telekom. Over the years, the platform has also represented healthy revenue growth. According to an estimate from Sacra, the company showcased a 367% revenue growth from 2022 to 2023. The last estimated revenue of the company stood at $70 million in annualised revenue by the end of 2023. The company has also been backed by significant venture capital. As per Crunchbase, it has raised nearly $400 million in eight funding rounds, backed by Sequoia Capital, Google, and NVIDIA, among others. As of its last funding round in August 2023, Hugging Face is currently valued at $4.5 billion. Last July, Clement Delangue, co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face, said that the platform is earning a profit despite having “plenty of money in the bank”. “[It is] especially noteworthy at a time when most AI startups wouldn’t survive a year or two without VC money,” he added. In a podcast episode with venture capitalist Matt Turck, Delangue offered further insights into how the company operates. According to him, the company’s freemium model allows a small portion of the users to pay for services, so that the majority of the platform can continue to remain open source and free. Delangue said the company identified that premium support and premium features appeal most to the enterprise segment, especially features around security and user management. This way, it was able to position the platform as a compelling value addition to enterprise customers. “Most large enterprises using AI are using us one way or another,” he said, adding that large companies like Microsoft and NVIDIA are big customers of the platform. Moreover, he revealed that, as of today, 1 lakh organisations use the platform, while 2,000 companies are using the Enterprise Hub. Beyond AI Models, Hugging Face Has Ventured Into Robotics Moreover, the company is venturing into robotics. A few days ago, Hugging Face announced two open-source humanoid robots, HopeJR and Reachy Mini. HopeJR is a full-sized humanoid robot featuring 66 actuated degrees of freedom, enabling it to walk and manipulate objects. Reachy Mini is a desktop unit designed for AI application testing capable of head movement, speech, and auditory interaction. HopeJR is expected to be priced around $3,000, while Reachy Mini will be around $300, subject to tariffs. Recently, the company announced the launch of SO-101, an open-source robot arm in collaboration with The Robot Studio, WowRobo, Seeed Studio, and PartaBot. The SO-101, designed for AI developers, is now available globally at a price ranging from $100 to $500. In April, Hugging Face acquired Pollen Robotics, a French startup specialising in open-source humanoids. “The important aspect is that these robots are open source, so anyone can assemble, rebuild [and] understand how they work. And [they’re] affordable, so robotics doesn’t get dominated by just a few big players with dangerous black-box systems.” Delangue told TechCrunch
Despite offering a majority of products, tools and services for free, Hugging Face has a straightforward, freemium business model like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini.
Despite offering a majority of products, tools and services for free, Hugging Face has a straightforward, freemium business model like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. 
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Supreeth is an engineering graduate who is curious about the world of artificial intelligence and loves to write stories on how it is solving problems and shaping the future of humanity.