Pay for Hugging Face Hub with your Google Cloud Account

A company that runs on Google Cloud can now pay for Hugging Face through its Google Cloud bill instead of a credit card. Hugging Face, a hosting site for open AI models and datasets, sells subscriptions for organizations and charges by usage for compute, such as GPU jobs, dedicated model deployments and calls to models hosted by partner providers. Linking an organization through the Google Cloud Marketplace listing puts all of that, plus Team or Enterprise subscription upgrades and extra storage, on the existing Google Cloud invoice. The practical gain is procurement: a team that already has a Google Cloud billing account does not have to register Hugging Face as a new vendor or put a corporate card on file to start using paid compute.

Setup starts on the marketplace, where an admin subscribes with a Google Cloud project and billing account and is sent to Hugging Face to choose which organization to link. The link is not immediate. Hugging Face's team reviews every marketplace subscription, and until it is approved, usage stays on the organization's existing payment method. After approval, an organization that already has a card on file switches at the start of its next billing period, while a free-tier organization without a card usually switches at once. Once linked, Google Cloud replaces the card entirely, so prepaid credits can no longer be bought; usage is metered and reported to Google Cloud instead. The monthly credits included in Team and Enterprise plans still apply first.

The option is for organizations only. Hugging Face's billing documentation says marketplace billing is not available to individual accounts, and an individual PRO subscription can be paid only by card. Google Cloud is the second marketplace Hugging Face supports for this, after AWS. The announcement mentions no discount for paying this way and says storage is charged at Hugging Face's public pricing.