HF Spaces: The world’s largest free AI app store with over 180k AI Apps

Today, subscriptions are everywhere. Whether it’s for storage, streaming, music, or even printing, companies have shifted to a subscription model because it offers them a steady, recurring income. This setup benefits everyone: users don’t have to worry about installing or managing heavy software, while providers enjoy a continuous revenue stream. Still, there are some services you can get for free.

Free and Open Source Alternatives

For example, say you want to transcribe YouTube videos. You could search online for services that offer this, but what if a similar service was free and open source? Would it be worth trying?

This approach isn’t just good from an economic point of view — it also has security advantages, especially for apps that handle private or sensitive data. (But that’s another story.)

So, what are the alternatives?

Even non-tech folks know that GitHub is filled with excellent projects available for free. However, for many, the technical expertise required to install and use these projects is a big hurdle. Some projects are as simple as a download, while others require installing libraries and configuring the software.

Fortunately, there’s a better option that usually requires no technical setup at all. You simply run the app—whether it’s for transcribing YouTube videos, converting video to MP3, or any other task—and it works immediately. No registration, no signup, and no fees. Amazing, isn’t it?

Hugging Face Spaces

The platform that makes this possible is one of the most open and collaborative open source communities on the planet: Hugging Face. Their service, called Spaces, lets you access free (and open source) applications. There are thousands of them for almost anything you can imagine—whether it’s converting files, generating videos, editing images, and much more. I highly recommend checking it out.

With their recent introduction of AI-powered search, you can now find applications using natural language. And here is how it looks:

What is Hugging Face?

Hugging Face Spaces is a platform where users can easily create, share, and use machine learning applications. It allows developers to showcase their work in a user-friendly way, making AI accessible to everyone without needing technical expertise to run or deploy models or any web application.

Example: YouTube to MP3 Converter

Let’s look at a specific example: an app that converts a YouTube video into an MP3 file (by the way, I’ve been looking for this for a while).