Hermes Agent: Nous Research's self-hosted agent, costs, skills and OpenClaw migration

Hermes Agent is Nous Research's self-hosted personal agent, published as open source under the MIT licence. It is not Hermes 4, the open-weight model family Nous Research also publishes; "Hermes" below means the agent. You drive it from a terminal, the Hermes Desktop app for macOS (Apple Silicon), Windows and Linux, a local web dashboard you can optionally expose, or a messaging gateway reaching Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal and email. The pitch is a learning loop: persistent memory, plus skills the agent writes for itself while it works. The current release is v0.21.3, tagged v2026.9.14 and published on 14 September 2026.

#What does Hermes Agent cost to run?

The software is free, so what you pay for is the model. Three routes: bring your own provider key; point Hermes at a local Ollama endpoint, where the setup guide tells you to leave the API key empty or type no-key; or subscribe to Nous Portal, whose free tier is limited to free models. Plus is $20 a month for $22 of credits with a $10 rollover cap, Super is $100 for $110 with a $50 cap, and Ultra is $200 for $220 with a $100 cap. Nous also sells a cloud-hosted version on those same subscriptions, and publishes no separate per-instance rate for it.

#How do skills, MCP and plugins work?

Skills are SKILL.md folders on the agentskills.io open standard, read from ~/.hermes/skills/ and from a project's own .hermes/skills or .agents/skills once you trust it. The /learn command turns a local folder or a documentation URL into one. The agent writes its own through a skill_manage tool, and setting skills.write_approval stages those writes for your review before they land. Hub installs draw on official, clawhub, lobehub and browse-sh among others, and each is scanned for data exfiltration, prompt injection and destructive commands. MCP servers live in ~/.hermes/config.yaml, go in with hermes mcp install, and Hermes will act as a server itself with hermes mcp serve. Plugins are a separate, mostly Python surface declared by a plugin.yaml manifest. Our Agent Skills explainer covers the shared format.

#How does Hermes Agent compare with OpenClaw?

Both are MIT-licensed and run on hardware you own, and Hermes courts OpenClaw users directly with a first-party hermes claw migrate command. It brings across SOUL.md, MEMORY.md and USER.md, skills into ~/.hermes/skills/openclaw-imports/, model and provider settings, MCP servers and messaging configuration. API keys stay put unless you pass --migrate-secrets. Cron jobs, plugins, webhooks, memory backends and files such as IDENTITY.md and HEARTBEAT.md are archived for manual review rather than migrated, so run --dry-run first. One hard limit sits in the installation docs: macOS on Intel is unsupported.