Rules / guidelines / best practices for monetizing a HF space?

huggingface is the new github…
…and way better positioned to be “the place to be” for ai

i’m interested in building some HF spaces and happy for the code to be open source, but need to cover the costs of external apis/inference/etc.

i’m excited to see some spaces have authorization requirements (like 3D Arena - a Hugging Face Space by dylanebert).

are there any examples of folks monetizing a space?

ideas that immediately come to mind would be either some kind of pay-as-you-go wallet to charge per request, or perhaps a “premium” space (or subset of the features of a space) that are faster/better but only accessible to subscribers.

presumably this is allowed? (or at least some forms of monetization are allowed? (ie…not ads))

i can always fall back to something like "this space is the free demo of myreallycoolapp[dot]com ", but i’m interested in finding a way to keep the entire user experience on HF if possible…


the closest thing i’ve found from searching:
on Content Policy – Hugging Face, there is mention of “gated repositories”, but is this even relevant to Spaces? i don’t see “Gated spaces” and maybe this isn’t necessary.

"Gated": Gated Repositories and their Community Content are visible to everyone, but access to their ML artifacts (data, model weights) requires either accepting conditions in a click-through form or approval by the Repository maintainers.

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I think that services for enterprises are valued in the first place, so there should be no problem with using Hugging Face commercially.

When it comes to commercial use of Spaces, I think the Embed method for your own page is a possibility. I don’t think there are many people who do business that is completed within Spaces itself.
Also, if you want to use it API-style, the Endpoint API is more reliable than Spaces. It’s not impossible to use.

Also, Gated is something like this, and I’ve never seen anyone using it with Spaces…
It exists in the Hub parameter specifications, but I don’t know if it actually works.

a Gated model

Embed your Space in another website

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