How I Hosted a Production AI App for $10/Year — HuggingFace Spaces + Cloudflare Worker

Every "deploy your AI app" tutorial sends you to Railway, Render, or Vercel.

I needed something different. My app runs:

None of these work on serverless platforms.

After research and testing, I landed on:

HuggingFace Spaces (free) + Cloudflare Worker (free) + Custom domain (~$10/year)

Here's why this combination is unbeatable for AI apps.

Resource	Free Allocation
RAM	16GB
CPU	2 vCPU
Disk	50GB
Spaces	Unlimited
Sleep	After 48hrs inactivity

Full Docker support — any framework, any language. FastAPI, SSE streaming,

long-running processes — all work perfectly. Compare this to Railway (512MB)

or Render (512MB) on free tier.

Feature	Free Allocation
Worker requests	100K/day
Bandwidth	Unlimited
SSL certificates	Auto, free
CDN locations	300+ globally
Domains	Unlimited

User → yourdomain.com (Cloudflare Worker)

→ username-spacename.hf.space (HF Spaces)

→ Docker container (your app)

→ External APIs

HuggingFace custom domains require Pro ($9/month).

The free URL username-spacename.hf.space

is fine for testing but not

for a real product.

The fix? A Cloudflare Worker that proxies all traffic — free, instant, global.

export default {
  async fetch(request, env, ctx) {
    const url = new URL(request.url);
    const targetUrl = 'https://username-spacename.hf.space' 
                    + url.pathname + url.search;

    // Convert HEAD to GET for HF Spaces compatibility
    // Critical: monitoring tools (UptimeRobot etc) use HEAD requests
    // HF Spaces returns 405 for HEAD — this fixes it
    const method = request.method === 'HEAD' ? 'GET' : request.method;

    const newRequest = new Request(targetUrl, {
      method: method,
      headers: request.headers,
      body: request.method === 'HEAD' ? null : request.body,
    });

    const response = await fetch(newRequest);
    const newHeaders = new Headers(response.headers);
    newHeaders.set('Access-Control-Allow-Origin', '*');

    return new Response(
      request.method === 'HEAD' ? null : response.body,
      {
        status: response.status,
        statusText: response.statusText,
        headers: newHeaders,
      }
    );
  },
};

⚠️

The HEAD→GET conversion is not optional.Without it, UptimeRobot

and other monitoring tools will report your site as DOWN even when it's

perfectly healthy. HF Spaces only accepts GET requests on the root path.

Create a Space at huggingface.co/spaces/new — select Docker as SDK.

Your Dockerfile

:

FROM python:3.11-slim
WORKDIR /app
COPY . .
RUN pip install -r requirements.txt
ENV PORT=7860
EXPOSE 7860
CMD ["python", "-m", "your_app"]

Push your code:

git remote add hf https://huggingface.co/spaces/username/spacename
git push hf main

Add API keys in Space Settings → Variables and Secrets.

myapp-proxy

)In Cloudflare DNS, add:

@

username-spacename.hf.space

Add a free UptimeRobot monitor pointing to https://yourdomain.com

.

The HEAD→GET Worker fix ensures monitoring shows green correctly.

As a bonus — UptimeRobot pings every 5 minutes keep HF Spaces awake,

preventing the 48hr sleep entirely!

Service	Monthly Cost
HuggingFace Spaces	$0
Cloudflare DNS + Worker + SSL	$0
UptimeRobot monitoring	$0
Domain name	~$0.83
Total
~$0.83/month

For comparison:

Railway, Render, and Vercel dominate tutorials because they have marketing

budgets. HuggingFace Spaces + Cloudflare is genuinely better for AI apps:

✅ 16GB RAM vs 512MB on competitors

✅ Full Docker support

✅ No process killing or timeout limits

✅ Global CDN via Cloudflare

✅ Auto SSL

✅ $0.83/month total

The only cost is your domain name. Everything else is free.

I used this exact stack to deploy my own AI DevOps tool —

feel free to check it out at deepshell.cloud.

If this helped you, drop a ❤️ and follow for more DevOps + AI content.

source & further reading

dev.to — original article 99. Build a Chatbot With Memory Generative UI - The Future of Human-AI Interaction I cured my adhd with ai.