Hugging Face founder Clement Delangue says users underestimate AI hosting costs and resist paying $9 monthly fees
Story Overview
Hugging Face founder Clement Delangue points out that builders often lowball the real engineering and infrastructure tab for hosting AI models and datasets at scale, which fuels pushback against even the modest $9 monthly Pro subscription despite clear storage and inference perks.
Storage bills that quietly sink projects
High AWS S3 costs have already factored into competitor shutdowns, as large checkpoints and private artifacts rack up charges that startups struggle to absorb month after month.
HF's pitch for cheaper AI-native storage
The company positions its Hub buckets with deduplication as a lower-cost alternative to S3 at roughly $8-12 per TB, bundling perks like reduced egress fees that could sway teams weighing migration.
Users praise Hugging Face for expertly managing large-scale storage and compute costs to achieve strong product-market fit, in response to high S3 bills forcing an AI competitor's shutdown.
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@yacineMTB yeah, not enough people understand how hard it is to do what the HF team does at scale (and start complaining as soon as we ask them to pay $9 a month haha)
@ClementDelangue These S3 bills are too hard to bear for some
@yacineMTB @ClementDelangue You would think Microsoft uses Azure at cost :)
@yacineMTB @ClementDelangue There's a funky way around this but I'm not sure if it works at Huggingface-scale. We'll see
@ClementDelangue @yacineMTB when executed well, compute, network & storage can be exceptional business. kudos on finding excellent PMF alpha with your storage offering 🚀🚀