Hermes Agent Setup: Build a Free 24/7 AI Agent From Scratch

To set up a Hermes Agent you need three things: somewhere for it to run, a model to think with, and a channel to reach you on. The software itself is free and open source. You only pay for the brain and the box, and both can cost nothing. Budget about 30 minutes, and no code at all.

Hermes is an AI agent you own. Three things make it different from a chatbot:

• It runs on its own. It acts on a schedule and messages you first, instead of waiting for you to open a tab.
• It remembers. Your preferences, your projects, the way you like things done, across every device.
• It improves. When it works out how to do something, it saves that as a skill and reuses it forever.

That is the difference between a chatbot and an employee.

Where does a Hermes Agent run?

There are two roads, and one of them is free.

The free road is any machine you already own that can stay switched on. An old laptop, a mini PC, a Mac Mini. Mine lives on a Mac Mini on my desk, on 24/7, and it costs me the electricity and nothing else.

The rented road is a cloud server, which can come in cheaper than your monthly coffee. Your options:

• A one-click host. On the Hermes Agent site you can deploy straight to the cloud, or sign up to the Nous Portal, which is exactly that.
• Hostinger, who sponsored the video this article came from. Their template installs and deploys Hermes for you without you ever opening a terminal. The promo code SHARBEL takes 10% off.
• A bare server from a provider like Hetzner or Contabo, around $6 a month, where you install Hermes yourself over SSH. More steps, cheapest ongoing cost.

Whichever you pick, aim for about 8 GB of RAM. That is comfortable for a single agent.

On Hostinger specifically, the flow is: pick a plan (KVM 2 is plenty), enter SHARBEL at the promo code field, uncheck the add-ons you do not need, keep the username hermes, reveal the admin password and paste it somewhere safe, then hit deploy. A couple of minutes later you are looking at your dashboard. Their instant web scraping add-on is worth checking: it bundles 1,000 Oxylabs credits free on a 12-month plan.

One warning before you install anything

This agent can write files, run code, and browse the web on its own. A web page it reads can try to give it instructions. That is a real attack called prompt injection.

Two rules to carry through the whole setup:

1. Give it its own machine where you can. Not your main laptop with every personal file on it.
2. Leave approval gates on so it asks before anything risky. More on how, below.

Installing Hermes

On your own machine, go to the Hermes site, download the build for your operating system, and run the installer. It walks you through it. You land on the Hermes desktop app.

On a one-click host you sign up, pick a plan (the free one is fine to start), click create agent, then create instance. When it finishes, open the dashboard.

If your interface looks different from a guide you are following, you can always open the same screen from a terminal:

hermes dashboard

Either way you end up on the dashboard, which is the control room:

• Sessions is every conversation.
• Models is the brain.
• Cron is the schedule.
• Skills is what it has taught itself.

It cannot think yet, because nothing is connected. That is next.

Which model should a Hermes Agent use?

This is the step most people get wrong, usually by reaching for the most expensive model for everything. You do not need that. Think in three tiers and match the model to the job.

Top tier is the boss. Save it for hard decisions, coding, and anything where being wrong costs real money.

Middle tier is the workhorse. Solid reasoning at a fraction of the price, and right for planning and everyday jobs.

Bottom tier is the grunt workers. Sorting, tagging, summarising, formatting. The stuff that does not need a genius.

The trap: free does not mean smart. Most free models you can actually run are cheap for a reason. Give them the grunt work, keep something strong for the thinking, and test before you hand anything hard to a free model.

Connecting a model, cheapest first

• Free, hosted. OpenRouter tags a set of models free. They are rate limited, so you get a capped number of runs a day, but they are genuinely fine for testing and light background work.
• Free, local. Run a small model on your own hardware with Ollama. Nothing leaves your computer and it costs nothing. A small local model is a grunt worker, not a genius.
• Pay as you go. Also OpenRouter. Drop in $5 and on a cheap model that lasts weeks. This is where I would actually start. If you want one recommendation, start with DeepSeek V4.1 Flash.
• The subscription hack. If you already pay for ChatGPT, you can run OpenAI's Codex subscription on that same plan and add no new bill. Go to Keys in the dashboard, choose to connect your Codex subscription, log in, copy the pairing code, and paste it back.

Then send it a hello. If it answers, the brain is alive.

Giving it a phone number with Telegram

This is what turns it from a tab you visit into something that reaches you.

In Channels, pick Telegram and scan the QR code with your phone. It spins up your own private bot. Set that as your home channel, which is where updates land. You are on the allow list automatically, so nobody else can talk to your bot.

The Topics hack

Do not just DM your bot in the one-on-one chat. Put Hermes in a Telegram group and turn on Topics.

Now you have rooms, split by job:

• General for quick questions and whatever you throw at it.
• Email where it drops new leads and drafts. A feed, not a conversation.
• Alerts where it only pings you when something breaks or changes.
• Content, or whatever else your week actually contains.

One agent, one unified memory, organised into rooms so nothing gets buried. This single change is what makes it feel usable rather than clever.

Its first real job: the morning priority cron

Every morning before I am up, Hermes messages me and asks what my number one priority is. I reply with a voice note while I am still holding coffee. By the time I sit down, it has started, and sometimes finished.

Send this to your agent once and it runs every day:

Every morning at 7am, message me and ask my number one priority for the day.

When I reply, start working on it right away and get as far as you safely can before I sit down.

Don't spend money or send anything externally without asking me first.

Two other jobs worth setting up the same way: point it at your inbox to draft replies in your voice ready for you to approve, or have it watch something that matters (your signups, a competitor, a price) and message you only when it actually changes.

The part where it writes its own automation

This is the thing a chatbot cannot do. Hand it an outcome, not a procedure, and let it work out the how:

Keep an eye on my niche for anything new worth knowing.

Build yourself a skill for the check. Keep track of what you've already shown me.

Run it every hour.

And prepare a reel for me to film about it in my voice. Only message me when there's something genuinely new.

I sent that once. It wrote its own skill, set its own schedule, and a few hours later my phone buzzed on its own with nobody at the keyboard. A chatbot waits for you. This starts the conversation, and sometimes finishes it.

Two settings that make it yours

It learns how you like things. Correct it once and tell it to remember:

That's too long. Keep it short, no bullet points. Remember that.

That preference now holds in every future chat, including brand new ones. You correct it once, not forever. This is the thing that makes an agent hard to leave.

Save what works as a skill. When it does something well that you will want again, tell it to save that as a skill if it has not already. Next time it runs the whole process start to finish. That is how it gets better every week instead of starting from scratch.

What a Hermes Agent costs to run

The server is a few dollars a month, or free on hardware you already own. The model is the only real variable, and it stays small because Hermes caches most of what it rereads. $5 on a cheap model genuinely lasts weeks.

One guardrail: if you are on pay as you go, set a spending limit at your model provider so it can never surprise you.

For safety, put approval gates on anything that spends money, sends something to a client, or deletes things. You set them in plain language in any chat:

Put approval gates on anything that spends money, sends something to a client, or deletes files. Do all the prep, then ask me before the final click.

Let it do the prep and you approve the final click. That is how you hand it real work and still sleep.

Where to go next

Get one agent doing one real job before you add anything. That is where it clicks.

After that there are two directions. You can give Hermes a team: several bots, each with its own job, handing work between each other. Or you can run separate profiles, a work agent and a personal one, so they do not share a brain.

Every prompt from this guide

Every morning at 7am, message me and ask my number one priority for the day.

When I reply, start working on it right away and get as far as you safely can before I sit down.

Don't spend money or send anything externally without asking me first.

Keep an eye on my niche for anything new worth knowing.

Build yourself a skill for the check. Keep track of what you've already shown me.

Run it every hour.

And prepare a reel for me to film about it in my voice. Only message me when there's something genuinely new.

That's too long. Keep it short, no bullet points. Remember that.

Put approval gates on anything that spends money, sends something to a client, or deletes files. Do all the prep, then ask me before the final click.

hermes dashboard

Further reading

• Hermes Agent and the Nous Portal for the hosted version
• Hostinger, the sponsor, with SHARBEL for 10% off
• OpenRouter for free and pay-as-you-go models
• Ollama for running a model locally
• DeepSeek, the pay-as-you-go model I would start on
• Telegram for the phone channel