Hermes Agent by Nous Research is a free, open-source AI agent that a business can run as a digital assistant, with a memory of the company, real tools and a schedule of its own.
Nous Research is the AI lab behind it, the licence is MIT, and the only bills you can get come from the model you connect and the place you host it.
This post explains what it is and who makes it first, and then shows how a business owner, an agency and a creator would actually use it.
I run Hermes every day inside my own company, and I checked the company facts and prices below on 12 October 2026.
Hermes Agent By Nous Research In Plain English
Most AI tools are a chat box.
You type, it answers, and it forgets you when you close the tab.
Hermes Agent is different in four ways.
- It remembers, because it keeps notes about you and your business between sessions.
- It acts, because it can search the web, read files, run commands and use other software.
- It works alone, because you can give it jobs that run on a schedule.
- It comes to you, because it can live inside Telegram, Slack, WhatsApp, Discord and email.
The official description is "the self-improving AI agent built by Nous Research".
"Self-improving" means it writes down how it solved a hard task as a skill, and then reuses and improves that skill later.
Who Nous Research Is
Nous Research calls itself "a pioneer in open AI training and research" on its website.
Its mission statement is to "create and proliferate open access to intelligence".
Here is what a business owner should know about the company, with the source for each point.
| Fact | Detail | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Legal name | Nous Research, Inc. | The company website footer |
| Founded | 2023 | The Block, April 2025 |
| CEO | Jeffrey Quesnelle | The Block, April 2025 |
| Other named founders | Karan Malhotra, Teknium and Shivani Mitra | The Block, April 2025 |
| Funding | A $50 million Series A led by Paradigm, after about $20 million of seed funding | The Block and Fortune, April 2025 |
| Known for | The Hermes family of open-weight AI models, and now Hermes Agent | Hugging Face and GitHub |
Teknium is a pseudonym, and it's the name that researcher uses in public.
I've only listed what those outlets reported, and I've left out anything I couldn't confirm.
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Hermes The Model vs Hermes The Agent
Nous Research uses the word Hermes for two products, and mixing them up leads to bad buying decisions.
The Hermes models are language models that Nous has published on Hugging Face since 2023, including Hermes 3, Hermes 4 and Hermes 4.3.
The Hermes Agent is the software that turns any language model into a working assistant.
Think of the model as the employee's brain and the agent as their desk, phone, calendar and filing cabinet.
You don't have to use a Hermes model with Hermes Agent.
The official README says it works with Nous Portal, OpenRouter, OpenAI or your own endpoint, so you can plug in the model your business already trusts.
What Hermes Agent Costs A Business
The software itself is free, so the real question is what the brain and the hosting cost.
| Cost line | Price I saw on 12 October 2026 | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Hermes Agent | $0 | The MIT-licensed software |
| Hermes Desktop | $0 | The official app |
| Nous Portal Free | $0 | Free models only, with standard rate limits |
| Nous Portal Plus | $20 a month | $22 of credits and access to 200+ models |
| Nous Portal Super | $100 a month | $110 of credits |
| Nous Portal Ultra | $200 a month | $220 of credits |
| Hermes Cloud Standard | $0.51 a day while running | An always-on agent with 2 GB of RAM |
| Hermes Cloud Pro | $0.99 a day while running | An always-on agent with 4 GB of RAM |
| Hermes Cloud stopped | $0.03 a day | Storage only |
The Hermes Cloud page said those instance prices exclude model and tool usage.
It also said you need at least $2 in credits, or an active subscription, before you can deploy.
A running Standard instance for a full 30-day month works out at about $15.30, which is simple maths on the daily price and not a quote from Nous.
You can also pay nothing at all by running a free model on Nous Portal or a local model on your own computer.
Free models rotate and have rate limits, so I treat them as a way to test and not as a foundation.
How To Get Hermes Agent Running In Your Business
You don't need a developer for the first version.
- Download Hermes Desktop from the Hermes website and install it like any other app.
- Sign in to Nous Portal inside the app and pick a model, starting with a free one.
- Tell the agent what your business sells, who your customers are and how you like things written.
- Ask it to save that to memory.
- Give it one small, safe job, such as summarising a document.
- Connect one chat app, so you can message it from your phone.
- Add one scheduled job, such as a morning summary.
If you prefer the terminal, the official install command for Linux, macOS and WSL2 is this.
curl -fsSL https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/install.sh | bash
hermes setup
My best Hermes Agent setup ranking covers the six ways I'd put the pieces together.
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How A Business Owner Uses Hermes Agent
These are the jobs I'd hand over first, and three of them are jobs I run myself.
The morning briefing
A scheduled job sends me a recap of my to-do list at 6am every day.
I read it on my phone before I open my laptop.
Inbox triage
Another job summarises my inbox each morning and tells me which messages need a reply.
The agent reads and sorts, and I still write the replies that matter.
Daily learning
I have a daily Japanese lesson delivered by the same agent, which shows the schedule works for personal goals as well as work.
Research with sources
The v0.20 release added research that comes back with citations matched to the real page, so you can check the claim instead of trusting it.
That's useful for competitor checks, supplier research and market notes.
A team of named bots
Bot Mode lets you create named bots, each with its own model, memory, skills and routines.
You can put one on research and one on admin, and they can work together in a group chat.
How An Agency Uses Hermes Agent
Agencies ask me one question more than any other, which is how to keep clients separate.
The answer is profiles.
A profile is a separate agent on the same machine, with its own memory, skills, keys and model.
hermes profile create client-acme
hermes -p client-acme setup
That gives you a clean wall between clients, and it means one client's notes never leak into another client's work.
Here is how I'd structure an agency setup.
| Layer | What I'd do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| One profile per client | Create it with hermes profile create |
Memory and keys stay separate |
| One chat channel per client | Connect it through the gateway | The team messages the right agent |
| Scheduled reports | Add a weekly cron job per client | Reports arrive without chasing |
| A cheap default model | Use a strong model only for hard jobs | Many small jobs add up |
| Approvals on | Keep the default approval mode | A human signs off risky actions |
I use Hermes for SEO work in my own agency, including keyword research and competitor analysis.
I won't promise you a number, because results depend on your offer and your clients.
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How A Creator Uses Hermes Agent
A creator's bottleneck is usually research and repurposing.
- The agent can pull notes on a topic and return them with sources.
- It can turn a document or a book into a reusable skill with the
/learncommand. - It can draft outlines in your voice, because your style lives in its memory.
- It can talk, because voice mode lets you speak to it and interrupt it mid-answer.
I've used /learn to turn a full book into a skill, and the agent then applied that book's ideas to new questions.
Every Hermes Agent Feature A Business Should Know
| Feature | What it means for a business |
|---|---|
| Memory | The agent stops asking the same questions every day. |
| Skills | A process you teach once gets reused. |
| 60+ built-in tools | It can search, browse, read images and create files. |
| Gateway | Staff message it in the chat app they already use. |
| Scheduled jobs | Reports and reminders run without a person. |
| Subagents | Big jobs get split and run in parallel. |
| Profiles | Each client or department gets its own agent. |
| Plugins | A catalogue of add-ons extends what it can do. |
| Hermes Desktop | Non-technical staff get a normal app. |
| Hermes Cloud | Nous hosts an always-on agent for you. |
| Seven terminal backends | Commands can run locally, in Docker, over SSH or in the cloud. |
My sibling post on the Hermes Agent backend explains that last row in plain terms.
Limits A Business Should Know First
I like this tool a lot, so here are the honest downsides.
It moves very fast. GitHub showed 37 tagged releases between 12 March and 8 October 2026, so settings and menus change often.
It is still below version 1.0. The latest tag was v0.21.6, which tells you the team still considers it early software.
The model decides the quality. A weak free model will give weak work, and no agent can fix that.
Security is your job too. The official docs say some of the built-in guards are defence in depth and not a hard boundary.
Support is community-first. The project lists a Discord and GitHub issues, and the Nous website links to business and enterprise pages that I haven't used.
Free models come and go. The Nous homepage described its newest free model, MissingNo, as free for a limited time, and I cover it in my Hermes MissingNo post.
Is Hermes Agent Safe For A Business?
The official security page lists layers of protection, including approval of risky commands, deny-by-default access for chat users, container isolation and scanning of project files for prompt injection.
That is a serious design, and it's still not a reason to hand over the keys on day one.
- Start with read-only access to anything that matters.
- Keep command approvals on.
- Use the pairing step, so only approved people can message the agent.
- Give each client a separate profile.
- Check your model provider's data terms before you send client data through it.
- Run
hermes backupbefore every update.
Hermes Agent vs Other Agents I Cover
| Agent | Type | Cost | Runs where | Best business fit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hermes Agent | Open-source personal agent | Free, MIT | Your machine, a server or Hermes Cloud | An always-on assistant with memory |
| OpenClaw | Open-source personal agent | Free, MIT | Your machine or server | A similar job with a different community |
| Claude Code | Paid coding and work agent | A paid Claude plan or API | Your machine | Building software and sites |
| OpenCode | Open-source coding agent | Free, MIT | Your machine | Coding on a budget |
| Hark Pro | Hosted personal agent | A free plan, then $20 or $100 a month | Its own cloud computer | People who want no setup |
| StarNet | Open-source agent station | Free, MIT | Your machine | Tinkerers who like local tools |
I don't treat these as rivals in my own business, because I use Claude Code to build and Hermes to run things every day.
My best Hermes Agent alternative post goes through each one.
Official Products vs Independent Add-Ons
Several products carry the Hermes name without coming from Nous Research.
- Hermes Agent, Hermes Desktop, Hermes Cloud and Nous Portal are official.
- FlyHermes is an independent paid host run by HF Data Studio LLC, and its site says it is not affiliated with Nous Research.
- Herald OS is an independent open-source desktop that uses Hermes Agent as its interface, and its GitHub page says the same.
None of that makes the independent tools bad.
It just means you should know who you're paying and who you'd ask for help.
My Verdict For Business Owners
Hermes Agent is the agent I'd start with if you want one assistant that learns your business.
The software is free, the company behind it is a funded AI lab with a public track record in open models, and the feature list covers memory, tools, chat and scheduling in one install.
The trade-off is that it's fast-moving, pre-1.0 software, so someone in your business needs to own it.
Start free, give it one boring daily job and only then decide what to pay for.
🚀 Want my finished Agent OS instead of starting from zero? The AI Profit Boardroom includes the installable Agent OS I run my own company on, with Hermes already wired in, plus four coaching calls a week and 3,400+ members to learn with. → Join the AI Profit Boardroom
Also On Our Network
- 🌐 The step-by-step Hermes Agent install and setup walkthrough
- 🌐 Every Hermes Agent feature scored in a full review
- 🌐 How Hermes Agent fits into an Agent OS
- 🌐 Which models to run inside Hermes Agent, with real scores
FAQ: Hermes Agent By Nous Research
What is Hermes Agent by Nous Research?
Hermes Agent is a free, open-source AI agent made by Nous Research, an AI lab focused on open models and open research.
For a business it works like a digital assistant that remembers your company, uses tools, runs jobs on a schedule and answers you in chat apps.
How much does Hermes Agent cost a business?
The software is free under the MIT licence.
Your costs are the model and, if you want it always on, the hosting.
Nous Portal listed a free plan for free models and paid plans at $20, $100 and $200 a month, and Hermes Cloud listed $0.51 a day for a running Standard instance, before model usage.
Who owns Nous Research?
Nous Research, Inc. is a private company.
The Block and Fortune reported in April 2025 that it raised a $50 million Series A round led by Paradigm, and The Block named Jeffrey Quesnelle as CEO.
I have not seen a full public list of shareholders, so I won't guess beyond that.
Is Hermes Agent open source?
Yes, the code is public on GitHub at NousResearch/hermes-agent, and the GitHub API lists the licence as MIT.
That licence lets a business use, change and deploy the software without paying a fee.
Is Hermes Agent safe for client data?
It can be, if you set it up with care.
The official docs describe command approval, deny-by-default chat access and container isolation, and they also warn that some guards are not a hard boundary.
Use a separate profile per client, keep approvals on and choose a model provider whose data terms your clients accept.
Is FlyHermes or Herald OS an official Nous Research product?
No, because FlyHermes is a paid hosting service run by HF Data Studio LLC, and Herald OS is an independent open-source desktop.
Both say they are not affiliated with Nous Research.
The official hosted product is Hermes Cloud.
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About Julian
I'm Julian Goldie, an SEO entrepreneur, author and founder of the AI Profit Boardroom, which has 3,400+ members.
I help business owners scale with AI agents, automation and SEO.
- I built Goldie Agency, a 7-figure SEO and link building agency based in Bangkok.
- I've grown a YouTube channel to 400,000+ subscribers.
- I wrote "Link Building Mastery", a book on link building strategies.
- I run GoldieBench, where I score AI models on real one-shot builds.
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Give it one daily job this week, and you'll see for yourself what a business gets from Hermes Agent by Nous Research.
