Hugging Face Inference Providers

Inference Providers is Hugging Face's hosted routing layer: one Hugging Face token gives "access to hundreds of machine learning models, powered by world-class inference providers", including Baseten, Cerebras, Cohere, DeepInfra, Fal AI, Featherless AI, Fireworks, Groq, HF Inference, Novita, Nscale, OVHcloud, Public AI, Replicate, Scaleway, Together, WaveSpeedAI and Z.ai. It is reachable through the huggingface_hub and @huggingface/inference clients or as a drop-in OpenAI replacement at the base URL https://router.huggingface.co/v1, with provider selection policies (:fastest, :cheapest, :preferred) and automatic failover. Hugging Face charges "the same rates as the provider, with no additional fees", and every account gets monthly credits ($0.10 for free users, $2.00 for PRO, $2.00 per seat for Team or Enterprise). Two limits are worth knowing before adopting it: the OpenAI-compatible endpoint is "currently available for chat completion tasks only" (image, embedding and speech work must use the Hugging Face clients), and provider capability is uneven, with feature extraction, text-to-video and speech-to-text each supported by only a handful of the partners; using a custom provider key also means monthly credits do not apply and the provider bills you directly.