HuggingChat
Chat with open-weight models, auto-routed by Omni and paid in credits
Overview
HuggingChat is Hugging Face's chat interface for open-weight models such as Kimi, GLM, DeepSeek, Qwen and SEA-LION. Its Omni router picks a model for each message, and usage is billed against Hugging Face Inference Providers credits. The app closed in July 2025 and relaunched as HuggingChat Omni that October.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 14 Oct 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete. This is not financial or purchasing advice — always confirm the current price on the provider’s official website before making any decision.
- Hugging Face login
- Pay-as-you-go Inference Providers usage
- $2 of included inference credits monthly
- Pay-as-you-go beyond the credits
- 8x ZeroGPU quota and highest queue priority
- 10x private storage capacity
- $2 of inference credits per seat
- Centralized token control and approvals
- ZeroGPU and Inference Providers PRO benefits for members
Use cases
What you can produce with HuggingChat
- Answers from 120+ open-weight models in one chat window
- Automatic model choice per message through the Omni router
- Web search answers through the built-in Exa search tool
- Hugging Face Hub papers, datasets and Spaces queried through ML Intern and the Hugging Face MCP server
- Side-by-side comparisons of open models such as Kimi K3, GLM 5.3, DeepSeek and SEA-LION
- A self-hosted chat interface from the Apache 2.0 chat-ui codebase
HuggingChat is a convenient way to try a wide spread of open-weight models from one window, with Omni choosing a model per message, Exa web search and Hugging Face MCP tools built in, and an Apache 2.0 codebase you can self-host.
It is no longer a free-for-all: usage draws on Inference Providers credits, Hugging Face now lists none for free accounts, and PRO at $9 a month includes $2. Assistants from the original app have not returned. Good for comparison and experiments; heavy users should price credits first.
What we found
HuggingChat is Hugging Face's chat app for open-weight models. It launched in April 2023 as an open-source answer to ChatGPT, and Hugging Face closed it on 1 July 2025, saying in its announcement that the app had always been free and experimental and pointing users to a Zip export of their history. It returned on 16 October 2025 as HuggingChat Omni.
Omni is a router: it reads each message, sends it to the model its rules assign to that kind of task, and shows which model answered. The live model list, read on 14 October 2026, held 127 entries including Omni, with recent releases such as Kimi K3, GLM 5.3, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and Qwen 3.8 alongside two SEA-LION v4 models from AI Singapore; earlier versions of this page cited 122 and then 141. The production configuration routes image and tool requests to DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, connects Exa web search and Hugging Face's own MCP server, and adds an ML Intern mode for working with papers, datasets and Spaces. Custom assistants, a feature of the original app, remain switched off.
The cost model is what has changed most. HuggingChat runs on Hugging Face Inference Providers and needs a Hugging Face login. At the Omni relaunch, free users could spend a small monthly allowance of inference credits. Hugging Face's Inference Providers pricing page, read on 14 October 2026, now lists no monthly credits for free accounts: they buy credits, or subscribe to PRO at $9 a month, which includes $2 of credits. We could not confirm from a primary page whether a free account can still chat without buying credits, so this page no longer describes it as free.
The code behind it is still Apache 2.0 on GitHub, with commits as recent as 9 October 2026, and anyone can run their own instance. For trying many open-weight models from one window it remains convenient; regular users should budget for credits.
Compiled by RECATOOLS from public sources: vendor documentation and pricing, code repositories and published reporting.
Notable facts
- HuggingChat was the first major open-source ChatGPT alternative to reach millions of users, launching just 5 months after ChatGPT.
- The platform runs the latest open-weight models including Llama 3 within days of their release, making it the fastest way to try new open models without local setup.
- Hugging Face hosts over 500,000 open-source AI models and datasets on its platform, making it the GitHub of the AI world.
Frequently asked questions
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including HuggingChat's official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with HuggingChat unless explicitly stated.
Third-party AI tools update their pricing, features, availability, and policies frequently. Information here may be outdated by the time you read this — we make reasonable efforts to keep listings current, but cannot guarantee absolute accuracy.
For the latest details, please refer to HuggingChat directly →
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