How to host your own Hermes AI agent (free)
Hermes is an open-source agentic AI that can browse the web, write code, remember facts, and run tasks autonomously. Hosting it yourself used to require Docker knowledge and a VPS. With Karp, you can have a running Hermes agent in under 60 seconds — no DevOps required.
What is Hermes?
Hermes is an agentic LLM runtime built by Nous Research. Unlike ChatGPT or Claude, Hermes is designed to run in a loop — it can call tools, browse the web, write and execute code, and self-improve by consolidating what it learns into long-term memory.
The key difference: Hermes is stateful. Every conversation adds to its memory. Over time it learns your preferences, your projects, your style.
Option 1: Use Karp (recommended)
Karp handles all the infrastructure. You get a managed Hermes agent with Telegram integration, web chat, and persistent memory — hosted on Karp with automatic scaling and health checks.
- Sign up at karpdo.com
- Choose a template (Personal Assistant, Developer Agent, or blank)
- Connect your LLM key (DeepSeek is cheapest at ~$0.001/1k tokens)
- Click Deploy — agent is live in under 60 seconds
- Chat via the web UI or scan the Telegram QR code
Free tier includes 5 demo messages without an API key. No credit card required.
Option 2: Self-hosted on a VPS
If you want full control, you can run Hermes yourself on any Linux server.
# Install Hermes pip install hermes-agent # Run with your DeepSeek key OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-your-deepseek-key \ OPENAI_BASE_URL=https://api.deepseek.com \ hermes serve --port 8000
You'll also need to set up Telegram, persistent storage, and process management (e.g. systemd or PM2). The Karp platform handles all of this automatically.
Which LLM should I use?
Hermes works with any OpenAI-compatible API. Our recommendations:
- DeepSeek V3 — best value, great reasoning, $0.001/1k tokens
- OpenRouter + Llama 3.3 70B — free tier available, strong for coding
- Claude 3.5 Sonnet — best instruction following, $3/M tokens
- GPT-4o — strong multi-modal, good for vision tasks
Next steps
Once your agent is running, try connecting it to Telegram for mobile access. See our Telegram setup guide for step-by-step instructions.