"Free GPU hosting" is the headline; the mechanism is worth knowing before you build on it. ZeroGPU Spaces don't allocate you a GPU — your function gets scheduled onto a shared pool, GPU attached for the duration of a call, then released. Between calls you own nothing.
Consequences that surprise people: cold starts when your Space hasn't run recently (weights reload), queueing under load (your demo is slow exactly when it's popular), and per-call duration limits that make long generations fail rather than finish late. Daily usage quotas apply on top.
It's a genuinely good deal for what it is — demos, model cards, low-traffic inference — because the idle cost of a real GPU is the thing that kills hobby projects. It is not a place to hang latency-sensitive or throughput-steady workloads, and no amount of optimization changes the scheduler.
What fits, what doesn't, and the quota details: https://toolfreebie.com/hugging-face-spaces-free-gpu/
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