Spaces

license

Proprietary

source

closed

platform

proprietary(HF-managed hosting/orchestration, no self-hostable Spaces)

open-part

app SDKs only (Gradio Apache-2.0, Streamlit) which are separate, portable OSS products

hardware-tiers

CPU free + paid GPU upgrades

Spaces apps are built with open source SDKs such as Gradio, which run anywhere, but the Spaces host itself has no public source and cannot be self-hosted. Hugging Face's terms of service claim ownership of the platform, and it is sold only as metered compute on its own infrastructure with no self-hosted option, keeping Spaces closed even though the apps running on it are typically open.

• https://huggingface.co/docs/hub/spaces recorded 2026-09-29

  Spaces docs overview: apps run on Hugging Face hosting with Gradio or Streamlit, "you can also unlock the whole power of Docker and host an arbitrary Dockerfile", or static HTML. Searched the body for self-host, on-prem and open source: none.

• https://huggingface.co/pricing recorded 2026-09-29

  Pricing page: Team and PRO plans are described as "Host your own ZeroGPU, Gradio & Docker Spaces on compute", with a Spaces hardware table from CPU Basic (FREE) and CPU Upgrade ($0.03) through ZeroGPU and hourly Nvidia T4 and L4 tiers. Searched the body for self-host and on-prem: none, so Spaces is sold only as Hugging Face compute.

• https://huggingface.co/terms-of-service recorded 2026-09-29

  Terms of Service, Proprietary Rights clause: "We retain ownership of all of our intellectual property rights related to the Website and the Services, including all improvements to the Services." Searched the body for open source, self-host and on-prem: no open license or self-hosted distribution offered.

Spaces has no count anyone outside Hugging Face can check. Hugging Face describes it on its own homepage as hosting more than a million apps, but publishes no visitor or usage numbers, and a Space is neither a package nor a registry entry, so no download feed covers it. The reading comes from that disclosure alone, which is why it is recorded as a claim about standing rather than a measured count.

• https://huggingface.co recorded 2026-09-25

  Spaces panel closes with "Browse 1M+ applications"; the customer count reads "More than 50,000 organizations are using Hugging Face" over Ai2, Meta, Amazon, Google, Intel, Microsoft. No per-Space or aggregate visitor figure is published.

Spaces hosts machine-learning apps with broad SDK and GPU support, from a free CPU tier through paid GPU hardware, and a Space can also serve as an MCP server, agent tool or API endpoint. But each app runs in a managed Docker container rather than a hardened microVM, and free-tier Spaces sleep when idle, making it built for hosting and demoing apps rather than isolating untrusted code.

• https://huggingface.co/docs/hub/spaces recorded 2026-09-29

  Spaces docs overview: apps run on Hugging Face hosting with Gradio or Streamlit, "you can also unlock the whole power of Docker and host an arbitrary Dockerfile", or static HTML. Searched the body for self-host, on-prem and open source: none.

• https://huggingface.co/docs/hub/spaces-dev-mode recorded 2026-09-29

  Spaces Dev Mode page: "Spaces Dev Mode is a feature that eases the debugging of your application and makes iterating on Spaces faster." and "The changes you make when Dev Mode is enabled are not persisted to the Space repo automatically."

• https://huggingface.co/docs/hub/spaces-gpus recorded 2026-09-29

  GPU upgrades page: "If you want your Space never to deactivate or if you want to set a custom sleep time, you need to upgrade to paid hardware." with Nvidia T4 and A100 hardware listed.

• https://huggingface.co/docs/hub/spaces-mcp-servers recorded 2026-09-29

  Spaces as MCP servers page: "To create your own MCP-enabled Space, you need to" enable MCP support in a Gradio Space, and Spaces added to an MCP client are listed under "Spaces Tools" in settings.

• https://huggingface.co/docs/hub/spaces-overview recorded 2026-09-29

  Spaces overview page: "On free hardware, your Space will “go to sleep” and stop executing after a period of time if unused." Also states "creating a Space that runs on compute (Gradio or Docker) requires a paid plan".

• https://huggingface.co/docs/hub/spaces-storage recorded 2026-09-29

  Spaces storage page: "This disk space is ephemeral, meaning its content will be lost if your Space restarts or is stopped." and "are the recommended way to persist data in your Space."

• https://huggingface.co/pricing recorded 2026-09-29

  Pricing page: Team and PRO plans are described as "Host your own ZeroGPU, Gradio & Docker Spaces on compute", with a Spaces hardware table from CPU Basic (FREE) and CPU Upgrade ($0.03) through ZeroGPU and hourly Nvidia T4 and L4 tiers. Searched the body for self-host and on-prem: none, so Spaces is sold only as Hugging Face compute.