Gradio SDK now marked as “Paid” when creating a new Space

Hugging Face has restricted free-tier accounts from selecting Gradio as an SDK when creating a new Space, impacting a nonprofit that uses the platform for teaching AI/ML to teens. The organization is seeking clarification on whether this is a permanent policy change and if an education exemption exists.

Hi all, posting here in case any HF staff can weigh in, and to flag this for other educators who might be hitting the same wall. We run a nonprofit that teaches free technical education to teen scholars 13-18 across the US and internationally. Our AI/ML curriculum has scholars build a simple CPU-based Gradio chatbot and host it on their own Hugging Face Space as part of a live summer camp lesson. As of this week, we noticed that new free-tier accounts can no longer select Gradio as an SDK when creating a Space. We tested this on a freshly created account to confirm it wasn’t account-specific. This is a significant change for classroom/education use cases where scholars are running lightweight demo apps, not production workloads, and can’t reasonably be asked to individually purchase PRO. A few questions for the community and HF team: - Can anyone confirm whether this is an intentional, permanent policy change or a rollout in progress? - Is there an education/nonprofit path for free Gradio Space hosting? - Is there a better channel to reach the team directly for something time-sensitive like this we have scholars in a live cohort right now ? Happy to share more detail about our program if useful. Thanks for any pointers