Hermes Agent by NousResearch is an open-source AI agent that does something most frameworks do not: it learns from experience. It creates skills during use, refines its memory across sessions, and supports parallel subagents and a built-in cron scheduler. You can run it on a $5 VPS, a GPU cluster, or serverless infrastructure.
The part that makes it immediately approachable is its provider flexibility. Hermes supports 200+ models across a growing list of providers, and you switch between them with a single command — no code changes. That means you can get started entirely on free tiers before committing to a paid API.
This post covers which free providers work with Hermes Agent and how to get up and running with each.
Installing Hermes Agent
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/main/scripts/install.sh | bash
