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

Spaces
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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!

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@meganariley ?

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I think they’re lacking resources; I think they should reallocate resources to solve the problem. I don’t know about you, but for me, with 2 CPUs and 16GB of RAM, my space usage usually doesn’t exceed 10GB of RAM; the bottleneck is at the CPU. So I think they should reduce the RAM to 8-12GB and, if possible, increase the CPU.