Hermes Agent

Hermes Agent is Nous Research's open-source agent. The install is free, and the plan decides which models and hosted tools the credits pay for.

The program is free. The model is a separate bill

Hermes Agent is built by Nous Research and released under the MIT license. The homepage FAQ says you can point it at your own model provider, or connect Nous Portal for model and tool credits. Cloud hosting is optional. The four plan cards do not print a price for that hosted agent. The desktop preview on the same page is labeled a beta preview. Desktop builds are listed for macOS 12 and newer, Windows 10 and 11, and Linux. You can also reach it from the terminal, or from Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, or email.

The cards on the homepage are the Portal plans. The credit figures are dollar amounts.

• Free is US$0. It lists free models only, standard rate limits, and US$0 in monthly credits.
• Plus is US$20 a month. It lists 200+ models, hosted tool usage, and higher rate limits. The credit line is US$22.00 a month, marked as a 10% bonus, with a US$10.00 rollover cap. That column carries the words most popular.
• Super is US$100 a month. It lists the same 200+ models, hosted tool usage, and higher rate limits, with US$110.00 in monthly credits and a US$50.00 rollover cap.
• Ultra is US$200 a month. It lists the same three feature lines, with US$220.00 in monthly credits and a US$100.00 rollover cap.

The Portal is optional. The Portal doc says an install that already uses OpenRouter, Anthropic, or another provider keeps that setup. The Portal is then one more provider, switched with /model during a session or with hermes model between sessions. If hermes portal info shows the model is currently another provider, that usage is not on the Nous bill.

How many models, and which one not to pick

The paid cards say 200+ models. The Portal doc titles the catalog 300+ frontier models, and the last row of its table says 280+ additional models. The same page says Hermes 4, the 70B and 405B chat models, is on the Portal at a heavy discount, and that those models are not the ones to run inside Hermes Agent. It calls them chat and reasoning models, not the tool-calling loop the agent uses, and it says the Portal's own model page carries the same warning. For the agent it points at other names in the catalog, including Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-5.5 Pro, Gemini 3 Pro, and DeepSeek V4 Pro.

A paragraph about switching models mid-session says you do not need new credentials, you do not need a top-up, and you will not hit a surprise zero balance. The billing notes describe a different pair of actions: add funds now, as a single charge, or refill when the balance falls below a threshold you set, which charges automatically. When that automatic refill is off, the note says the line does not show amounts.

Hosted tools still spend the balance

The Tool Gateway is included with every paid Portal subscription. It routes web search, image generation, text-to-speech, and a cloud browser through Nous, so you do not open a separate account for each. The same page says those calls are pay-as-you-use, billed against the subscription. Some accounts also get a free tool pool that covers gateway calls without a paid plan. That pool, when it is there, funds the FAL image models only. Krea in the same picker needs a paid subscription. Each tool is chosen on its own. The doc's example sends web search and images through Nous and leaves the browser on a Browserbase key you already have. While a tool is set to Nous, a direct key left in the environment file is ignored.

What remains when you stop it

The homepage says the agent learns your projects, writes skills, and never forgets how it solved a problem. The FAQ says stopping a local agent ends the running process and does not delete saved conversations, memories, or skills. Tasks that need an active agent do not run while it is stopped. Hosted agents are managed separately in Nous Portal. The contact printed on the homepage is [email protected].