Plans & pricing

Is Hermes Agent Free? Free Routes, Nous Portal Plans and Cloud Costs

Yes. Hermes Agent is free, MIT-licensed software, and Nous charges nothing if you run it on your own model keys, local models, your ChatGPT plan or a free Nous Portal account. Nous Portal Plus is $20 a month; Super ($100) and Ultra ($200) give five and ten times Plus's usage.

UpdatedNovember 6, 2026

In short

Yes. Hermes Agent is free, open-source software under the MIT license, and Nous Research charges nothing to install it on your computer or server. What costs money is the model behind it, and three routes keep Nous's bill at $0: your own provider keys or local models, your ChatGPT plan, and a free Nous Portal account that runs free models only. Nous Portal Plus, at $20 a month, adds paid models within daily, weekly and monthly limits that Nous does not publish as numbers, hosted tools such as web search and image generation, and one always-on Cloud agent.

On this page4

Three routes that cost nothing from Nous

Route	Who pays for the model	What it leaves out
Your own provider keys or local models	You pay the provider per token; nothing for a model on your own hardware	Nous's hosted tools and Hermes Cloud
Your ChatGPT plan, signed in inside Hermes or shared through Nous Portal	Your ChatGPT subscription, within its own limits	Other models, tools and Cloud hosting, which Nous charges when you go through the Portal
Nous Portal Free	Nobody: free models only, at standard rate limits	Paid models, Cloud hosting and most hosted tools (Nous's docs give free accounts managed web search)

Check prices on portal.nousresearch.com

Only the first route has no ceiling of its own: Hermes keeps working as long as the provider bill or your hardware allows. The ChatGPT route is not unlimited use. Nous says plan sharing does not lift ChatGPT's plan and app limits, and its docs say neither which ChatGPT plans qualify nor how Hermes's work counts against them.

Plus, Super and Ultra scale usage with price

Every paid Nous Portal plan is billed monthly, can be cancelled any time and includes Hermes Agent usage, the Tool Gateway's hosted tools and one Cloud agent. The limits reset daily, weekly and monthly, pricier models use the allowance faster, and requests made with a Nous API key always draw on pay-as-you-go credits instead.

Plan	Price a month	Usage, as a multiple of Plus	Cloud agent included
Plus	$20	Base allowance, size unpublished	4 GB RAM, 25 GB disk
Super	$100	5x	4 GB RAM, 100 GB disk
Ultra	$200	10x	8 GB RAM, 100 GB disk

On Nous's figures, Super costs five times Plus for five times the usage and Ultra ten times for ten times, so a bigger plan buys more usage and a bigger cloud agent, not cheaper usage (ToolColumn arithmetic). Past a limit you can switch to a free model, wait for the reset or keep going on credits, so start on Plus and move up only if you keep reaching its limits.

Credits pay for API-key requests, extra cloud agents and usage past the plan

Nous Portal credits are a prepaid US-dollar balance, topped up through Stripe with presets from $10 to $200. They pay for models at their listed per-token prices, for anything run through a Nous API key, and for Hermes Cloud beyond the plan's one agent. An extra or larger cloud agent bills once a day in arrears: compute by the second while it runs plus storage, or storage alone while it is stopped, with model and tool use on top. Deploying a cloud agent without a plan needs $2 of credit. Nous shows cloud sizes and daily prices only in the signed-in Portal, does not publish per-use tool prices, and its pages disagree on whether a plan's hosted-tool calls count against the plan or bill to credits.

MIT allows commercial use; Portal prompts can train Nous's models unless you opt out

The MIT license lets you use, change and run Hermes Agent commercially without paying Nous Research, while the models you connect keep their own terms. Through Nous Portal, you own the outputs made for you, but Nous's terms let it train on your prompts and outputs and license them to third parties unless you turn on Privacy Mode in your account settings, which applies only from then on. Nous Portal fees are non-refundable under its terms, including for a month you used only partly; a smaller first step is a credit top-up, which a Nous API key spends at each model's per-token price without a subscription.

Edited byRick Finch

Official sources

Editorial guidance grounded in official product sources.

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FAQ

Common questions

Do I need a Nous Portal account to use Hermes Agent?

No. Hermes Agent works with OpenRouter, OpenAI, your own endpoint and many other providers, including models on your own hardware. A Nous Portal account adds Nous's model catalog, hosted tools and Hermes Cloud.

Can I use a Claude or Grok subscription instead?

Not Claude Pro: Nous's docs say Pro subscribers cannot use Hermes's Anthropic sign-in, so they need a pay-per-token API key. A Claude Max sign-in works only with extra usage credits, and Hermes's use bills as extra usage even while the Max allowance sits untouched. Existing SuperGrok subscribers can sign in through xAI's browser login, the Grok route Nous's docs list.

Can I run Hermes Agent on my phone?

Nous offers no iOS or Android app. You reach your agent from a phone through messaging apps such as Telegram or WhatsApp, and Android can run the terminal version in Termux.

Does Hermes Agent cost anything on my ChatGPT plan?

Not from Nous. You can sign in with ChatGPT inside Hermes, or connect ChatGPT in Nous Portal and approve plan sharing, which needs no paid Nous subscription. Through the Portal, Nous says ChatGPT's plan and app limits still apply and it bills other models, hosted tools and Cloud hosting; for the sign-in inside Hermes, its docs do not yet say what your plan covers. Nous lists no eligible plans.

Can I get a refund on a Nous Portal plan?

No. Nous Research's terms say all fees are non-refundable, with no refunds or credits for a month you used only partly or not at all. Credit top-ups ($10 is the smallest preset) let you pay per token through a Nous API key without a subscription.

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