How to Run Hermes Agent FREE Forever!

**Julian Goldie** (0:00)
Today, I'm going to talk about some of the best free models that you can use directly with Hermes. I'm going to talk about four different ways that you can use Hermes Agent for free. I'm going to rate them and talk about, you know, which ones are the best and how to use them and how to get the most out of this. So let's get straight into this. The first method that you can use is News Portal. So for example, recently Step 3.7 Flash and Nemetron both came out for free with Hermes Agent. Now, if you're wondering how to use these with Hermes Agent and News Portal, what you could do here is you can go inside your terminal and then you can select Hermes model. And from there, you select News Portal. And if you're on the free plan, you'll see a list of models as you can see right here, right? So you can see between all the models that are available and which ones are available, right? And quite often they bring out free models. So for example, recently step 3.7 Flash was actually free and Nemetron 3 Ultra was also free. So just watch out for those. You can also compare the prices as well. So if you want to get just a cheap model instead of a free one, you can go with that option. Now the next option that you have is that you can use OpenRouter, right? Now if you want to change the model inside Hermes to OpenRouter, you can just type in Hermes model again and then you switch to OpenRouter. Now you just plug in your API key. Once you've done that, you can select between the models as you can see. Now also one thing to note here is that you can enter a custom model name. And if you go over to OpenRouter directly, if you type in free inside here, you can see there's a bunch of free models. So for example, Hermes 3.405b instruct is free. North Mini Code is free. Llama Nematron is free as well. So you can switch between these models, choose whichever ones you want. There's also a free models router on OpenRouter as well.
And so you can use the API from OpenRouter. Now if you're wondering how do you get the API key, if you just go to your home section here, so click on the settings and then home. From there, go to API keys and you can just grab an API key for free from OpenRouter and then plug that inside your terminal to start using it for free. And either way, whichever model you use, there are ways to basically never have to pay for Hermes ever again. What we actually do to organize this, and I'll tell you half way through. As we get into this, we've covered two methods already, which is News Portal and OpenRouter. If I was choosing one free model by the way of OpenRouter, I'd probably go with Gemma 4 or Owl Alpha. But there's loads of different options you can try and you can test them out for yourself and see which one you prefer the most. So what we have inside our agent operating system as you can see right here, is that we have separate profiles for each of the APIs that we plug into each of these models. So the cool thing about this is, for example, if we're using North Mini and the free API from North Mini, but we can have a separate agent profile just for North Mini, we can plug in the free API into that. And then if I'm like, right, I just want to use Hermes quickly for free, I can just go straight inside here. The same, for example, if we go to our local model setups, for example, Ornif.
Ornif is a novel free local model that just dropped this week. It's a self-improving model. And then you can use a self-improving local model with a self-improving agent, which is Hermes, and you can use that for free as well. So just proving number one, this works. And number two, you can actually organize these into free profiles and then switch between the ones you like the most.
Now, speaking of local models, you might be wondering, OK, how do you plug local models into Hermes? So there's a couple of options for this. Method number one is you can go to Ollama, download Ollama. Once you've done that, you can then go into any of these models. So for example, we look at Ornif, which I was just talking about a second ago. We can then go straight inside here, and we just need to run Ollama, run Ornif. So make sure you have Ollama open and installed. Make sure you have it updated. And then from there, you can copy this command, go inside your terminal and just pull the model in. So you'd start a new command and just run that model. Once you've done that, then you're going to go to Hermes model over here. And from there, you can scroll to Ollama, which we've got over here, and we can select our options. The option that you have as well with this is you can use LM Studio. So you can use LM Studio as a provider. And the cool thing about that is if you're using LM Studio, you can actually see which models are best for your local setup, it will give you a grade in terms of which models are too big and which models you can actually run on your local setup. So if we go to LM Studio, which is free to download here, and then we click on the model section, we can scroll through and we can see which ones would actually work. So you see how it says likely too large on this particular local model. We can just keep scrolling through, finding local models and find ones that are actually not too big for our setup. And that's how you can run local models. And then to set up with Hermes, you can go inside Hermes model and just change the model to LM Studio or Ollama.