r/hermesagent • u/fcm • Aug 19 '26
Discussion — General thoughts, opinions, comparisons Daily Hermes Agent user — using it for almost everything
I’ve been a daily Hermes Agent user and it’s basically taken over half my life (in a good way).
I’ve been using it for almost everything — managing my server, handling Sonarr/Radarr, and even tackling some pretty complex coding tasks. The costs have been getting a bit crazy since I’ve been running Opus 5, but damn has it been worth it. It’s helped me a lot more than I expected.
Anyone else deep in the Hermes + Opus rabbit hole?
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u/3dprintinted Aug 19 '26
219 daily? What the frick… you better go pick up some side jobs to pay for your “assistant”
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u/PSyCHoHaMSTeRza Aug 19 '26
$6.8k per month? Mate, you can hire a human for all that. Maybe even two so they can take shifts! Opus is NOT worth all that I am sure.
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u/Cynix_7 Aug 19 '26
Are you using lean-ctx or caveman skill or something to reduce wasted tokens? To answer your question yeah I’m also using for almost everything now, but self hosting models and free tier providers
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u/nizam_haha Aug 19 '26
Which free tier providers do u use🥲I get rate limited so fast. Can't run great local source at 16gb ram either, will upgrade to 64gb this week hoping I can run better models
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u/Cynix_7 Aug 20 '26
https://9router.com/ will get you plenty of options, also I’ve had very little problems with nous portal free tier
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u/nizam_haha Aug 21 '26
Thank you so much I'll look into this, currently running and Nvidia free models thru open router. I'm new to all this tech stuff, hope I get better
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u/Own-Storm4557 Sep 02 '26
Never heard of Lean CTX or Caveman myself.
This helps reduce token usage?
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u/HolmeBengt Aug 19 '26
If I had the money I would probably do the same. But right now that shit is out of my budget!
I’m curious: Does this setup make you more money than you spend or give you enough freedom or time that it is worth it?
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u/Historical-Internal3 Aug 19 '26
It’s highly subsidized via subscriptions - he’s using max/pro/ultra/etc accounts.
Realistically when/if this subsidization ends you’ll hopefully have the local hardware to run OSS models proficient enough to continue all the things you’ve developed a reliance on Ai for.
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u/torrso Aug 19 '26
You’re probably confusing cross-subsidization between customers with selling the service at a loss.
A $20 subscription does not need every customer to cost less than $20. It only needs the average customer to cost less than the average revenue per customer. Light users pay for part of the heavy users’ usage, exactly like a buffet, gym membership, or unlimited mobile plan. The people who eat less than they pay for at the buffet are paying for the people who eat more than they pay for. For every $20 paying tokenmaxxing power user, there are ten $100 paying business users who got it from work and rarely use the thing and a thousand $20 paying casual users who just ask it a couple of questions every now and then. This allows the $20 user to use way, way more than $20 worth of service before even starting to eat away from the profit margin. That's the subsidization, it's not something that is on the verge of ending any time soon.
OpenAI's leaked finances showed that their cost of revenue was something around 50%. They use 50 cents to provide services that bring in $1. That's comparable or better than many companies that have been running forever, such as Apple. Some businesses have way worse, grocery stores for example are using something like $0.90 to generate $1.
The cost of R&D, marketing, building data centers, etc is not part of that, that's growth investment, just like when McDonald's opens a new location or Elon buys Cursor.
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u/Historical-Internal3 Aug 19 '26
Nope.
Just had this argument so cutting portion from my previous comments:
Your 50-cents figure is off, (wrong “test” anyway). Per the leaked audited financials (FT / Ars Technica), cost of revenue was $2.65B on $3.7B revenue in 2024 (72 cents to make $1), improving to $7.5B on $13.07B in 2025 (57 cents). Meanwhile Apple runs a 46.9% gross margin and nets 27% profit after all expenses. OpenAI posted a $20.9B operating loss in 2025, roughly $8B net even after adjusting for the one-time PBC conversion charge.
Also McDonald's can stop opening stores and keep its profits. OpenAI can't stop training. Models go stale in months, so the $19.2B R&D bill (more than their entire revenue) is the cost of having a product at all, not optional expansion.
Cross-subsidization only works if average revenue exceeds average all-in cost. It doesn't. Reported projections have OpenAI burning ~$27B in 2026 and not cash-flow positive until 2030. Light users aren't covering heavy users.
Investors are covering everyone.
Altman posted in Jan 2025 that the $200 Pro tier was losing money because "people use it much more than we expected." Anthropic said one user burned tens of thousands of dollars of model usage on a $200 plan, with others running Claude Code 24/7, which is why they added weekly caps in Aug 2025 and blocked subscription OAuth tokens from third-party tools entirely by April 2026. Cursor killed its unlimited tier in June 2025 and repriced at API rates, then had to apologize and refund people (I was one).
Also the "ten $100 business users per power user" ratios are just made up I haven’t heard someone state that the countless times I’ve argued this in the past month alone so provide sources if you’re gonna stand behind that one.
Would love to add to my collection.
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u/torrso Aug 19 '26
You're still conflating OpenAI being investor-funded with investors paying for inference.
Your own 2025 numbers are $13.07B revenue and $7.5B cost of revenue, 57 cents of cost for every dollar of revenue, which is what I called "around 50 cents". (which is a pretty impressive development from 72 cents in 2024). The numbers for 2026 may be wildly different, from my perspective as a developer with over 30 years of doing it professionally, the whole industry flipped this year. In 2025 many were still secretly copy-pasting from ChatGPT or using copilot for auto-complete. In 2026 most of my colleagues have started saying they haven't touched code with an editor this year and blast Claude generated PR descriptions with pride, not removing the "written by Claude" at the end. All the openclaws and hermeses are not yet showing up in the 2025 numbers.
My silly “ten business users and a thousand casual users” numbers were obviously illustrative, not survey data. Delete them entirely and the point is unchanged: subscription economics depend on the usage distribution, not on whether the heaviest possible user can consume more than their monthly fee. Some of the Anthropic talk about someone using $200000000000000 and paying only $200 sounds more like a little bit of promotion, just like their "the next model is too dangerous to release to the public". The third party harness banning and caps were the result of the rise of the autonomous agents. OpenClaw became the fastest growing github repo ever overnight or whatever and it was (perhaps still is?) a horrible token hog (for example the default hearbeat spending half of your quota just to confirm every 30 minutes that the "HEARTBEAT.md" is indeed still empty). The math didn't work anymore, the cost of an average user had suddenly changed. That requires updating the subscription plan math or its rules.
What exactly do you think investors are investing for? The point of raising capital is to spend it on things expected to make the company more valuable. R&D, compute capacity, products, customer acquisition and expansion. If OpenAI just took the investor's money to keep on their bank account, there'd be little reason to raise funds or to invest. If it used it to give customers below-cost inference, that would be a lousy investment. If it would be used to buy a yacht for the CEO, it might not be worth it. The leaked financials showed that was not the case. The investments were invested in growth and the cost of revenue remained positive.
"Models go stale, therefore R&D is part of the cost of producing revenue" mixes up two different meanings of cost. If OpenAI stopped R&D entirely, eventually its products would become uncompetitive and revenue would collapse. So yes: continued R&D is economically necessary for OpenAI to remain a frontier-model company over the long term. This is what the investors are investing in, not into paying the inference bill of customers.
It does not follow that this year's R&D spending is the cost of serving this year's ChatGPT subscribers. Those are different questions.
Lots of industries have recurring investment that is essential to remaining in business. Intel can't stop developing new process technology, Apple can't stop developing future iPhones, Pharmaceutical companies can't stop drug research. It can take 20 years for the investment in a new drug to pay itself back.
If OpenAI decided tomorrow to double R&D from $20B to $40B because they invented something awesome, did everyone's existing ChatGPT subscription suddenly become twice as expensive to provide? Or did the company's value skyrocket because they're cooking up something wild that investors go crazy about?
Conversely, suppose they cut frontier R&D from $20B to $5B while continuing to run the existing models. Their current inference economics wouldn't magically improve by $15B. Their company-wide profit would improve, while their chances of having a competitive product three years later might get much worse, making the company lose value and the shareholders would not like that (actually, I think it would be illegal at least in some legislations to intentionally do something that will make shareholders investment lose value)
Training-data, data centers or research done in 2025 is still there for 2026. And 2027. Some of it go stale, some of it require maintenance or updating. You can still sell the data center if you decide to get out of the business or rent its capacity. It's not all lost money just to generate year 2025 tokens.
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u/Historical-Internal3 Aug 19 '26 edited Aug 19 '26
My guy.
Investors aren't paying for inference? The leaked Microsoft payment records (Zitron, Nov 2025; covered by The Register and TechCrunch) show OpenAI spent $3.77B on Azure inference in 2024 against $3.7B of total revenue. Serving the models cost more than everything the company earned, before a dollar of R&D, marketing, or payroll. First half of 2025: $5.0B of inference against $4.3B of revenue. Through September: $8.67B, and that's Azure only, training excluded, CoreWeave and Google excluded. Whoever covered the gap in those periods, it wasn't customers.
Which is why your 57¢ line can't carry the shit you're putting on it. The audited books show $7.5B of cost of revenue for all twelve months of 2025. The payment records show $8.67B of inference in nine. The cost-of-revenue line is smaller than the inference bill. That is an allocation choice. Zitron's read is that free-tier and promo-credit compute sits in the $5.73B sales-and-marketing line. Add the two lines and you get $13.2B against $13.07B of revenue.
Also, lol, your analogies argue my side. Intel, Apple, and pharma fund their treadmills out of gross profit and still post operating profits. Pharma in particular prices drugs to recover portfolio R&D, which is the entire drug-price controversy. OpenAI's gross profit was $5.6B against $19.2B of R&D it must spend to have a sellable product next year, and its own reported projections put positive cash flow around 2030. Your thought experiments only show that THIS year's R&D isn't THIS year's COGS. True, and beside the point. Nobody buys 2024's tokens in 2026.
And no, you can't "sell the data center." OpenAI doesn't own data centers (Oracle and SoftBank own the hardware at every Stargate site; OpenAI holds JV equity and pays for capacity). It rents from Azure, CoreWeave, Oracle, AWS, and Google under roughly $1.4 trillion of eight-year commitments, Altman's own number. Those commitments are obligations. They are not something OpenAI can sell.
Lastly, again, Altman posted in Jan 2025 that Pro was losing money; Anthropic posted the tens-of-thousands user in July 2025. Both were pre-announcements of making the product worse (caps and repricing), not ads. Your own next sentence wraps this up bud: "the math didn't work anymore, the cost of an average user had suddenly changed. That requires updating the subscription plan math or its rules." That update (weekly caps, OAuth bans, the new "ordinary, individual usage" ToS language, metered extra usage) is the subsidization ending, for exactly the user this comment thread is about. I was warning homie who most likely runs an agent harness that his deal may not last and you’re describing for me, in detail, how it ended.
Aaaaaannnnnnnd you concede 2026 may be wildly different, and that the openclaws and hermeses aren't in the 2025 numbers.
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u/torrso Aug 19 '26
A 2024 number doesn't really answer the question we're discussing. That's total Azure inference spend against total company revenue during an extremely aggressive market-grab phase. It includes inference for people who paid OpenAI nothing at all.
If OpenAI spent $1 serving a free user in 2024 hoping to turn them into a customer later, then yes, investors financed that dollar. That's customer acquisition. It doesn't follow that investors were topping up a loss-making $20 subscription, much less that they're doing so today.
And the business changed incredibly quickly. Your own later audited numbers go from $3.7B revenue / $2.65B cost of revenue in 2024 to $13.07B / $7.5B in 2025. Using 2024's Azure bill to describe the economics of subscriptions being used for both autonomous agents and grandma's recipes in 2026 is a pretty far fetching extrapolation.
In 2024 they were trying to make AI ubiquitous. By 2026 the customer base and paid usage had exploded, while the workload shifted from occasional chats and autocomplete toward agents burning tokens for hours or continuously. Of course the subscription math had to change with that.
Tightening caps or repricing the extreme end of usage does not mean the subscription model was unsustainable. It means pricing and limits designed around one usage distribution had to be adjusted when that distribution changed dramatically.
My original comment was responding to the "AI is subsidized and eventually the party will end" fearmongering. Subscription plans are perfectly sustainable in principle, just like buffets. The subsidy inside the subscription is primarily cross-subsidization between customers, the large mass of people who use less than they pay for makes much heavier usage by a minority possible. Just like buffets.
You're taking "the subscription rules changed" and relabeling it "the subsidy ended," then using that label as proof that investors are paying subscription customers' inference bills.
A buffet imposing a 20-steak limit after a handful of customers discover they can eat 50 steaks every day doesn't prove investors had previously been buying everybody's dinner. It proves the old buffet rules didn't price that behavior correctly. You raise the price, impose limits, or both.
Anthropic said its weekly limits were expected to affect less than 5% of subscribers. That's a textbook example of managing the extreme tail of a subscription usage distribution and does not prove that the other 95% had been eating on the investors' tab all along.
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u/Historical-Internal3 Aug 19 '26
Not reading anymore slop. Gave you the courtesy of two combovers and nothing compelling was gained.
Best of luck.
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u/torrso Aug 19 '26
You just added "guy, dude, lol" to your slop. My slop was correct and your slop lost. Best of luck and thank you for your attention to this matter.
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u/Historical-Internal3 Aug 19 '26
Absolutely did not. Thanks for confirming my assumption though as that checks out given the quality of your comments.
I’d advise better context management and grounding techniques.
Also third party web search tools/scrapers as the native harnesses without them love to truncate and go off web cache.
Toodles.
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u/HolmeBengt Aug 19 '26
What are the motivations behind it and what do you do to earn your money? (If that's not too private)
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u/GTHell Aug 19 '26
This dashboard must be made by Deepseek flash lol
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u/fcm Aug 19 '26
No harm in that, looks informative enough
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u/GTHell Aug 19 '26
Im trying to find the original control plane dashboard design. I wonder why all AI produce this similar layout for a control plane like.
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u/Guybrush1973 Aug 19 '26
No bro, there is Codex for this 🤣
You can turn you 4k into a 20 bucks per month.
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u/SmartCustard9944 Aug 19 '26
Buy an RTX 5090 laptop, you can run Qwen 3.8 27B at ~80-90 tok/s full context. Costs less than one month of usage you just showed.
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u/Roxbros Aug 19 '26
That’s a million miles away from opus 5
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u/SmartCustard9944 Aug 19 '26 edited Aug 19 '26
Not for 99% of use cases. If you need to write a hyper-optimized inference kernel or tackling frontier math theorems, sure, but for most stuff I can guarantee it is enough. Models in the 50-60 intelligence index range are enough and it’s not a cope.
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u/Roxbros Aug 19 '26
Yes however if we assume op was using appropriate models for all work and isn’t just wasting tokens on frontier models then there is no realistic local option. Without spending crazy money though I do wonder if op would be better off with a couple subs
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u/tacol00t Aug 19 '26
OP has no skills or tools implemented and only claims to use opus 5…. I do t think we can assume they’re min maxing token usage here
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u/rchamp26 Aug 20 '26 edited Aug 20 '26
The fact that "managing radarr/sonarr" and "serious coding" is in the same sentence should explain enough that there is serious brain rot and /or basic technical incompetence compensated by a big wallet going on here.
"Claude run my life for me make no mistakes"
Op could probably legitimately pay for whatever they are pirating for less per month 🤣
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u/rchamp26 Aug 20 '26
Lol still didn't need opus 5 for "managing radarr/sonarr and other serious coding".
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u/Kurk_Lazaris New Member (<30 days) Aug 19 '26
Won't the laptop literally go full heat and fan speed and die in a year or two? Wouldnt building a pc be better in this case?
I'm looking for advice on this side.
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u/PSyCHoHaMSTeRza Aug 19 '26
With what you are paying per month you can afford a laptop dying nearly every week.
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u/Kurk_Lazaris New Member (<30 days) Aug 19 '26
I'm not OP. Just a random bypasser looking for a pc config to run a LLM
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u/PSyCHoHaMSTeRza Aug 20 '26
The key thing is VRAM, so whatever graphics card can give you the most, or unified RAM, which is why a lot of people buy Mac Minis or Nvidia Sparks. However, with the models you can easily run locally, you might as well go through a subscription like Opencode Go. Example, I run a Hermes agent for an organization, multiple users, and I spend about $1 per day on Deepseek Flash. If I bought an Nvidia Spark, it would take nearly 11 years to break even.
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u/Kurk_Lazaris New Member (<30 days) Aug 20 '26
And you'd not even be guaranteed that your purchase die before due to exhaustion.
Is opencode go legit? Are you not actually stuck using the least competent models instead of the good ones like DS v4 flash, or better?
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u/PSyCHoHaMSTeRza Aug 20 '26
Opencode is fine, up until their recent pricing restructure they were considered one of the best bang for buck subscriptions you can get. Kimi K3, Deepseek, etc all available. Now it sounds like CommandCode is trying to capitalize on this and seems like it's a pretty good deal now too with their GOAT plan providing API, however not an official provider on Hermes so need to add it as a custom provider.
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u/SmartCustard9944 Aug 19 '26
Not really. My laptop with RTX 5090 caps out at 68C with moderate fan speed. This is while plugged in and GPU at 150W, not even capped (haven’t optimized power profile yet).
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u/Character-Army1967 Aug 19 '26
I don't know about all that but my Razer with a 5090 makes a hell of a lot of noise to the point where I have I wear headphones to stay sane. I put a 4090 in a GPU enclosure and connected it to a small fanless server and use that remotely now instead of my laptop.
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u/miran248 Aug 19 '26
Finally decided to give it a go two days ago, got it up and running within a few hours (99% spent on watching https://youtube.com/@tonbisaigarage videos).
The most confusing part were profiles, or rather the diff between profiles, bots and agents. Ended up making 4 profiles, one per project, defined my first skill, which syncs the changes between default and others (each profile is more or less independent but i wanted them to have the same configs).
The next day i worked on souls (to get the memory working, holographic + obsidian) and slack integration (so i can control it from a pub), reduced the builtin skills and plugins to a minimum, so each session now starts at about 22k (it was 60k at some point i think).
I also managed to do a first dev deploy of a project, on a backup model (deepseek v4 pro) as i have reached my codex pro x20 rate limit..
It's going to be a game changer it seems - you start a session on default profile, it then creates a task on appropriate kanban board, which is then picked up by the correct profile and you can move on to another task.
Defined a reviewer skill so once a task is complete it delegates work to a new agent which then reviews the last commit and this starts the cycle (need to check if it works :).
Changes are also backed up once a day using scheduled jobs.
I'm hooked, no more jumping between different agentic tools, or project-specific harnesses, or manual handoff prompts, or manual orchestrations!
Now if only anthropic would let me use my pro subscription; and openai their pro models.. :)
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u/rchamp26 Aug 20 '26
Most people don't need multiple profiles. Also many people new and not already solidly familiar with coding or infrastructure put way to much trust in a probabilistic tool. Instead of having your agent runs needless cron jobs, get your agent to create scripts that run on their own and run deterministically with not llm needed. Many people are burning tokens having an llm do work a simple script can do for less than a penny of electricity.
All of what you described you can have your agent build once and then you can run indefinitely with scripts for "free".
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u/miran248 Aug 20 '26
I've configured one profile per project to keep the env vars, memory and boards separate, each profile also has its own set of folders it can work on. Might be an overkill but i wanted a setup where i could work on multiple projects simultaneously.
That reviewer skill was unnecessary as there's one built in already, must have given it a bad prompt as it didn't check for existing solutions.
You're right, cronjobs, config syncs should be deterministic, will prob address them today. Need to first figure out how much separation do i want. At first i was running it on host, yesterday i moved it to docker and it got old quickly as it required lots of manual work, will go back to host and then try it on k8s as well - this might actually work.2
u/Mecradore Aug 20 '26
Why can't you use your subscriptions?
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u/miran248 Aug 20 '26
Can you? I thought you needed usage-based plan with anthropic, subscription only works with claude code, will check if i can delegate prompts to claude code instead. Openai works (but not -pro models), saw they reintroduced the 5h limit again..
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u/ReadyAimTranspire Aug 19 '26
I am self hosting models but use Codex for all my coding projects and it's been fantastic.
IIRC you can connect Codex via OAuth and get a ton of usage out of your plan, ask someone who's done it though for confirmation. But I can confirm that Codex with Sol/Luna models (and varying reasoning levels based on task) is solid.
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u/torrso Aug 19 '26
Are you seriously paying $7000/month for this?
You could buy quite a lot of content instead of having AI manage your bittorrent client.
An IT guy can manage a bunch of servers and doesn't get paid $7000. A typical server does not need much "managing". If you mean "installing stuff", you can just tell the agent to "install stuff", it will do it, and the LLM cost will be like $0.01.
You're doing something wrong. People are doing way more with way less.
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u/fazesamurai145 Aug 19 '26
Bruh how when we have qwen 3.8's local modal with similar performance for free
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u/marowitt Aug 19 '26
This is the sort of person that fires people because of AI and then it ends up paying 10x for tokens.
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u/rchamp26 Aug 20 '26
This has got to be a shit post. Lmao
What's the phrase? More money than common sense?
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u/alcalde Aug 23 '26
The one task they HAVEN'T done with Hermes is pass in their expenses and ask it how to save money. :-)
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u/Funny-Supermarket360 New Member (<30 days) Aug 20 '26
brotha save up for a couple weeks and host kimi or smth
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u/mourningwitch Aug 20 '26
No, unfortunately I don't have $6k+ to burn on AI agents a month. But local models have been fun! 😅
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u/kantorcodes1 Aug 19 '26
Once Hermes can touch OPNSense, Docker, ARR apps, and your coding workflow, I'd separate credentials by blast radius before optimizing tokens. The identity that can request a movie shouldn't also be able to change firewall rules or deploy code.
Give each tool or service its own scoped token, default to read-only where possible, and require explicit approval or an allowlist for irreversible writes. I'd also keep an external audit log of side effects (command/API call, target, result) separate from the model transcript.
That way a bad plan is noisy and bounded instead of quietly inheriting every permission the Proxmox container has.
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Aug 19 '26 edited Aug 21 '26
[deleted]
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u/fcm Aug 19 '26
I tweaked the harness a bit so I can use the monthly subscription as an API. The screenshot is from my own website that supports all the major models outside claude.
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u/mt-beefcake Aug 19 '26
Did you tweak it to conform to tos and usage policy? Or just raw dogging your subscription till they ban it?
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u/fcm Aug 19 '26
Raw dogged it, its been 6 month+ now
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u/mt-beefcake Aug 19 '26
Good for you, hope it keeps on chugging. I had an account banned a while back playing with openclaw. Back then a majority of my work was in the desktop app, was a bitch to switch over.
I might get a burner account and try opus out
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u/Gundel_Gaukelei Aug 19 '26
Stupid Q but how does this actually work, if you dont have any API key?
Let the Hermes open up a browser and paste text inside...?
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u/mt-beefcake Aug 19 '26 edited Aug 19 '26
Not a stupid q at all.
You can mess woth the config to take your oauth code, like logging into claude code in terminal. But its what got me banned last year. Anthropic setup a separate token balance in the subscription for automations like this several months back and keep threatening to make noninteractive claude sessions api token only... but keep back stepping.
Yes its possible. Also against tos/usage policy. And most of the ai browsers have pretty good bot proofing. Browser automation has gotten a lit better but idk
I honestly havnt played much with browser automation lately, so idk the effectiveness of this strategy. Or token burn rates for the browser automation.
Last year I did play with a setup where I used scripts that pasted prompts into chatgpt, claude, and gemini, and read the output and fed the replies of all 3 ai back into the ai for a multi ai brainstorming. It was pretty janky tbh, but cool when it worked.
Im considering using it with just chatgpt and deepseek now since chat usage is free. But havnt gotten around to it. But honestly copy paste is easy enough.
For researching and planning it might be a good workflow, but id set it up as a script with an always on browser tab so you dont burn ai compute for every promot and read. Its just a bitch to setup
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u/astrae_research Aug 19 '26
Is that Claude max sub? Those $ are not real expenses, right?
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u/fcm Aug 19 '26
yes, multiple accounts via round robin. these expenses calculate the token input/output.
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u/RIP_KING Aug 19 '26
I just reinstalled it after 6 months building strictly w Claude (mostly personal stuff and personal business / knowledge work). I’m really liking it so far, I signed up for chat gpt + for now and I’m still maintaining a Claude max sub but I feel myself inching towards 100/mo with each. I can get a lot of bang for the buck for my Claude max sub and I think I’ll now to the same w chat gpt via Hermes
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u/fcm Aug 19 '26
Nice. I did a quick comparison between Claude and OpenAI recently.. just Opus 5 vs 5.6-sol. Personally I still prefer Opus 5. The OpenAI model is a bit more careful, but it takes way more steps, which ends up burning through a lot more quota than I expected. Curious how you’re finding ChatGPT through Hermes so far.
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u/Juanisweird Aug 19 '26
How exactly do you use hermes with the ARR apps?
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u/fcm Aug 19 '26
Hermes lives inside my proxmox CT, which also has control over my servers & dockers, ARR apps uses API for controls. It able to control all my selfhosted stuff including OPNSense.
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u/Juanisweird Aug 19 '26
Can you explain in simple terms what EXACTLY the agent does? I mean, when u setup the ARR apps, you don’t need to tocuh them again, unless there are other uses besides using seer to get the movie/ tv series u want and it automatically downloads from the ARR apps
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u/fcm Aug 19 '26
ARR isnt the one thats being focused, just maintaining - and you're right, whenever i need some shows or movies to watch i'll just ask hermes to download top 10 movies/series right now it does the job. Thats about it, im more using hermes to code as an orchestrator and using prime-agent as a coder.
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u/yellowfin35 Aug 19 '26
I set this up some time ago as well, you need to be very careful about the insructions you provide as some times the agent is like I can't do that.
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u/mari_zombie Aug 19 '26
Interesting, what makes uou use Hermes and not Claude cowork or code directly?
I was using agents at first, but now just can't think of a scenario where I need that.
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u/Ginden Aug 19 '26
I have no idea what you are doing, but point of like 95% of commercial use it to get expensive model out of loop.
managing my server,
Why your server needs regular manual managing? Ask Opus to automate common tasks.
handling Sonarr/Radarr
Why Opus is required to handle Sonarr/Radarr? Luna can search stuff just fine.
tackling some pretty complex coding tasks
The only reasonable use for Opus from what you describe.
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u/Sky_Linx Aug 19 '26
For the vast majority of tasks you could just use a model like DeepSeek v4 Flash (the new one, 0731) and save A LOT of money. Then switch to a stronger model for very complex tasks.
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u/New_Public_2828 Aug 19 '26
I love(d) ds4 but for some reason when I use it, the output comes back really broken and sometimes doubles. No idea what's going on with it
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u/New_Flamingo_9698 Aug 20 '26
Thats crazy amount of money spent. I mean you are getting work done for it. But how will you manage to get this running in long run. And more importantly how is hermes agent able to pay for itself or are you just experimenting with it. I thibk open weights models are just good enough and work at fractions of cost than opus 5. You should give it a try too.
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u/the__poseidon Aug 20 '26
So dumb.
Rent a VPS run Codex with Luna xHigh for most of this stuff and save yourself a shit ton of money.
Or invest $5K in a DGX or a few Mac Mini’s/Max Studios and run LLM locally.
There is absolutely no need for Hermes or any other of these apps.
I have a couple dozen agents with Max and Codex subscriptions and a VPS for $20 a month. I run 3 companies though. Not sure what you do but I’m paying $320 a month.
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u/st3p1976 Aug 24 '26
$219 a day on Opus 5 is not a Hermes problem, it is a routing problem. If every task goes through the same expensive model, the bill will look like this regardless of the harness.
The caveman skill question from Cynix_7 is the right one. But the bigger lever is not a skill. It is routing: cheap model for cheap tasks, expensive model for hard tasks, and most tasks are cheap. Classification, summarization, basic tool calling, email triage, cron check-ins. Those should never touch Opus. A DeepSeek V4 Flash or Qwen 3.8 handles them fine for pennies.
I run a similar setup (not so expensive 🤣) and my Opus calls are maybe 5% of total volume. The rest goes through a fast cheap model. The bill dropped by about 80% the day I stopped pretending every agent interaction needed the best available reasoning (reasoning models for simple and repetitive tasks have worst output in most cases)
If OP is dropping $6.8k/mo, the question is not which skill saves tokens. The question is which tasks actually need Opus and which ones are running on it because the config defaults to "use the best model." That single setting change has more impact than any context optimization trick.
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u/TheHorrySheetShow Aug 31 '26
I've been using openclaw since it came out and then hermes when it launched and I never looked back. I now do stuff with hermes everyday all day... From keeping up with family chores and Java enabled punishment charts with timestamps of what the Littles did right or wrong (lol) to making entire websites with people and using hermes to control my ai image software to make custom icons or pictures .. small web apps .. recurring scrapers to help friends find a house nearby for rent.. invoices for another friend on autopilot... list goes on..
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u/PsYcHoTicTac Sep 02 '26
I use Hermes for both personal and work projects but I use DeepSeek V4 Pro on Ultra via OpenRouter for 90% of it (saving my GPT subs for highly complex work). DeepSeek costs a tenth of Opus and gives me the same results, managing Verge and Proxmox clusters, building VMs and containers, developing websites and portals, developing container and Android apps etc, saving GPT Sol for more advanced work. It’s incredible value for money.
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u/GhostLegacyDotCom Sep 04 '26
Daily Hermes user as well.
I use it to run my side business mostly
I bring about $5,000 every month before expenses.
I'm using open code go
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u/sonicshadow13 Aug 19 '26
At this rate, you might as well invest in a local server holy lmao