# Gradio Spaces now require a paid plan; big impact for our education use case > Source: > Published: 2026-07-09 14:47:08+00:00 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: Happy to share more detail about our program if useful. Thanks for any pointers!