Is Hermes Agent really free?

Yes. Hermes Agent is open source: the code is public and installing it costs nothing. At most you pay for hosting if you put it on a server, often a few euros a month. ChatGPT Plus, on the other hand, costs €23 a month.

Do I need to code to install Hermes Agent?

No. The level is intermediate and the install takes about 15 minutes with the prompt from the page: Claude does the work, you answer its questions.

How is it different from ChatGPT Plus?

Hermes Agent does most of what ChatGPT Plus does, without a subscription, and your data stays with you. The point by point comparison is on the page.

Yes. With an open source tool installed on your side, your files stay on your machine or your server. Nobody can close your account or change the price.

Free alternative

Free alternative to ChatGPT Plus

ChatGPT Plus costs €23 a month. Hermes Agent does the same job for free, in open source: you install it on your machine or a small server, and you stop paying.

Public entry price, taken from ChatGPT Plus’s website (chatgpt.com). Over a year, that is €276 that stays in your pocket.

What replaces ChatGPT Plus

The main alternative

Hermes Agent

🟡 Intermediate⏱️ ~15 min to installSave €23/mo

Hermes is an agent that learns. What sets it apart from a regular chatbot is its loop: it builds its own skills from what you have it do, improves them through use, searches its past conversations and gradually builds a model of who you are. It lives where you already are: Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, or in your terminal. It runs on a €4 server just as well as on your machine, and it accepts any model: yours running locally, OpenRouter, OpenAI, your own endpoint. Where ChatGPT, Claude or Cursor sell you a monthly subscription for a model they picked, Hermes lets you plug in whatever you want behind it, including a local model that costs nothing and lets nothing leave your machine.

Loucash’s verdict on Hermes Agent

10/10

This is the most obvious tool in the whole library, and the only one I give a 10. Deploying a Hermes wired to your second brain, with a local model behind it, is today the most direct way to have a personal agent that knows you and tells your life to nobody. Everything you pay for elsewhere by subscription, you get here in one command. This is not an idle recommendation: every one of my B2B clients has one. I systematically ship a Hermes in the backend of their system, it has become the default building block of my engagements. When a tool moves from testing to production at paying clients, that is the strongest signal I can give you. One trap I paid for, so you will not. Installing Hermes at a client, I had switched off the dangerous tools by copying names from the documentation. Three things escaped me at once: an unknown tool name is ignored WITHOUT any error, so the tool stays active; the name I had guessed was wrong; and the list the interface offers is only a subset of the real registry, so message sending was running enabled on a client's server. Seven active tools instead of the five I wanted. Remember two rules: a security restriction is read in the source code, never in the docs, and it is written as an allowlist. Then prove the real state with hermes tools --summary instead of trusting your config. That is why the second install step above exists.

Who it is for: You pay for one or more AI subscriptions and want an agent that belongs to you, learns from you, and can read your second brain without sending anything out.

See the full page →See the tool ↗

The prompt that installs Hermes Agent

Paste this prompt into Claude: it checks the repository, asks you its questions and installs the tool step by step.

Installe Hermes Agent sur ma machine (l'agent IA open source de Nous Research, repo GitHub NousResearch/hermes-agent) en suivant la procédure officielle de hermes-agent.nousresearch.com. Une fois installé, aide-moi à choisir mon modèle avec la commande hermes model : dis-moi si ma machine peut faire tourner un modèle local et lequel, sinon configure un fournisseur avec ma propre clé API. Vérifie enfin que la commande hermes démarre bien et que je peux discuter avec lui. Explique chaque étape simplement, je débute.

Dans mon installation de Hermes Agent (repo NousResearch/hermes-agent), je veux restreindre les outils disponibles. Va lire le dictionnaire TOOLSETS dans le code source du projet pour connaître la liste RÉELLE des outils, ne te fie pas à la documentation ni à la liste proposée par l'interface qui n'en est qu'un sous-ensemble. Puis configure une liste blanche : nomme uniquement les outils que je garde et coupe tout le reste. Termine en me prouvant l'état effectif avec la commande hermes tools --summary, et redis-moi le nombre d'outils actifs.

Review the GitHub repository and check whether it is safe to install given my machine and my infrastructure. Ask me as many questions as possible, using widgets, to clarify my request and be as precise as you can.

Frequently asked questions

Is Hermes Agent really free?: Yes. Hermes Agent is open source: the code is public and installing it costs nothing. At most you pay for hosting if you put it on a server, often a few euros a month. ChatGPT Plus, on the other hand, costs €23 a month.
Do I need to code to install Hermes Agent?: No. The level is intermediate and the install takes about 15 minutes with the prompt from the page: Claude does the work, you answer its questions.
How is it different from ChatGPT Plus?: Hermes Agent does most of what ChatGPT Plus does, without a subscription, and your data stays with you. The point by point comparison is on the page.
Do I own my data?: Yes. With an open source tool installed on your side, your files stay on your machine or your server. Nobody can close your account or change the price.