{"slug": "gradio-spaces-now-require-a-paid-plan-big-impact-for-our-education-use-case", "title": "Gradio Spaces now require a paid plan; big impact for our education use case", "summary": "Hugging Face has restricted Gradio Spaces to paid plans, preventing new free-tier users from selecting Gradio as an SDK. The change disrupts a nonprofit's free AI/ML education program for teens, which relied on students hosting lightweight chatbots on free Spaces. Educators are calling for alternatives or exceptions for classroom use.", "body_md": "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.\n\nWe 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.\n\nAs 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.\n\nA few questions for the community and HF team:\n\nHappy to share more detail about our program if useful. Thanks for any pointers!", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/gradio-spaces-now-require-a-paid-plan-big-impact-for-our-education-use-case", "canonical_source": "https://discuss.huggingface.co/t/gradio-spaces-now-require-a-paid-plan-big-impact-for-our-education-use-case/177619#post_1", "published_at": "2026-07-09 14:47:08+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-09 14:48:27.533633+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-tools"], "entities": ["Hugging Face", "Gradio"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/gradio-spaces-now-require-a-paid-plan-big-impact-for-our-education-use-case", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/gradio-spaces-now-require-a-paid-plan-big-impact-for-our-education-use-case.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/gradio-spaces-now-require-a-paid-plan-big-impact-for-our-education-use-case.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/gradio-spaces-now-require-a-paid-plan-big-impact-for-our-education-use-case.jsonld"}}