Hermes Agent
Hermes Agent by Nous Research: what it does, how it works, pricing and adoption — sourced and dated.
Self-hosted agents Open source · MIT ≈249K GitHub stars (2026-09)
Hermes Agent is Nous Research's self-improving open-source agent, launched February 25, 2026 under the MIT license. It runs on your own infrastructure, remembers your projects across sessions, and auto-generates reusable skills as it works, so it gets more capable the longer it runs. Growth was explosive: about 180,000 GitHub stars in under four months, roughly 249,000 by September 2026.
How it works
A long-lived assistant process: it holds tools (terminal, files, web), keeps persistent memory across sessions, and turns completed work into reusable skills it improves over time — the learning loop is the differentiator. Reachable via Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, desktop app or terminal.
The facts
| Maker | Nous Research |
| Type | Agent product |
| Category | Self-hosted agents |
| Status | Active |
| Launched | 2026 |
| License | MIT |
| Models | Model-agnostic: Nous Portal, OpenRouter, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, DeepSeek, local endpoints and 20+ other providers; switching models is a configuration change. |
| GitHub stars | 249,000 (snapshot 2026-09) |
| Website | https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com |
Pricing
Free and open source (MIT). You pay only for the model usage on whichever provider you connect; it runs on anything from a $5 VPS to a GPU cluster.
Pricing model: Free / open source · Source: published tiers · checked Oct 14, 2026
Also in Self-hosted agents
- OpenClaw — OpenClaw (open-source project)
Sources
- ToolRadar — What is Hermes Agent? (Oct 2026)
- DEV — Hermes Agent, the open-source AI agent explained for business (2026)
Profile verified Oct 14, 2026. Spotted an error? Every figure above links to its source.