Cannot duplicate this space without a paid/PRO subscription
Hi. I was doing the Agents course and on this page (https://huggingface.co/learn/agents-course/unit1/tutorial) it shows that I can duplicate the space for free. Now I see that CPU Basic requires a Pro subscription.... Can you check how I can duplicate this space for the course for free?
`## UPDATE ##: Saw the other ticket too where people mentioned you cannot use it for free now. See this: https://huggingface.co/spaces/agents-course/First_agent_template/discussions/733
Same root cause as #733 and #737 — here are the numbers I posted there, since they answer your specific question.
CPU Basic has not been removed, but it is now rarely what a new duplicate of this template lands on. Sampling 30 copies created in each of the last three months (out of the 28,689 copies of this template in a census of 1,458,692 public Spaces):
- June 2026 — 30 of 30 on
cpu-basic(100%) - July 2026 — 11 of 30 (36.7%)
- August 2026 — 2 of 30 (6.7%)
In August, 24 of 30 were on zero-a10g (ZeroGPU) instead. So two of thirty August copies did get free CPU — it is worth opening your Space's Settings and trying to set hardware to CPU basic before assuming it is gated behind Pro.
That hardware shift is also what produces the error in #737: this template is plain CPU smolagents code with no @spaces.GPU decorated function, and ZeroGPU refuses to start a Space without one. The breakage rate of new copies tracks the shift almost exactly: 4.1% (June) → 39.0% (July) → 58.7% (August).
If you are stuck on ZeroGPU, adding any trivially decorated function satisfies the startup check:
import spaces
@spaces.GPU
def _noop():
return None
Or run Unit 1 locally with Ollama or a free Gemini API key, as @csongorosz did in #733.
What I cannot tell you is why the hardware options changed. I only observe what the API reports after the fact, so I cannot say whether this is a pricing change, a quota change, a rollout, or a bug — that question needs someone at Hugging Face. I have reported the measurements upstream at https://github.com/huggingface/agents-course/issues/733
I do not work for Hugging Face. Method and code: https://github.com/ashishsinha1602/dataset-integrity-audit