Hermes + Owl Alpha = FREE AI Agents

Hermes agent just got a massive free upgrade and it changes everything right now you can run Hermes agent completely free using a brand new model called Owl Alpha. Owl Alpha was built specifically for AI agents like Hermes that means it's faster smarter and way more powerful for the kind of work you actually want to do and the best part is it's free. I'm going to show you exactly how to set it up in just a few minutes even if you've never touched any sort of code or agents in your life. By the end of this you're going to have a fully working AI agent running on one of the most powerful free models available right now.

This is the same model that the biggest AI tools in the world are already using and I'll show you which ones later. If you've been waiting for the right time to start using AI agents in your business this is it let's get into it. Now today I'm going to show you how to use Hermes agent for free using a really powerful method that I think 99% people are not aware of right so you can see an example here this is open core and the usage is just it's on it's dropping in trajectory right it's becoming less and less in demand right whereas for example we look at Hermes and it's growing in demand the trajectory since the start of the month versus now it's just growing all the time right and so how can you use Hermes agent for free. I'm going to show you a couple of ways I'm going to start off with probably the easiest method that you can use right now right so if you don't have Hermes agent already installed you can just grab the github Hermes agent and from here you can just go to the quick install section and you just copy and paste this command to set up right if you're on linux or mac os if you're on windows and you use this command instead what else we got here we invented multitasking nice stuff man good to see here all right what we're going to do here is we are going to set up Hermes with open router I'm going to use something that is a free api and it's just being released now every single month there are new free api so if this sometimes eventually after the trial period after the beta period these get taken down but then it will be replaced with a new api right so if you if you if this gets if people stop using this or if this isn't free anymore no problem there will be another replacement on open route so there is every single month so here's how to use Hermes agent for free with our alpha right so what we can do here is we just go to Hermes setup inside our terminal once we've installed Hermes then we're going to scroll down and we shall go to open router which you can see right here then from there we need to select our model which you can see over here so we can switch between all these different apis and you can see that actually minimax m2.5 is free which is pretty cool and you've also got nvidia nemetron 3 super which is also free so there are two different free apis you can use with um directly right which is pretty cool the other option that you have so when when you do this you just select the model so let's say for example we wanted to use minimax m2.5 free right you just add your credential here so what you do is you go to your settings once you've logged in to open router so you go to your settings here and then you just create a new key like this create that and once you've done that you would go back over to Hermes paste this in right so we click yes and then we paste our api key here which i've done now then we hit enter enter through everything else and that's good to go now we're going to launch Hermes chat again as you can see we're now using minimax m2.5 free we've opened router um and that's that's how you can use it right now the model that i would prefer to use and recommend when you're doing this and setting this up is owl alpha right so if we go over to owl alpha inside open router and then we're going to go from here all right so what we can do is paste this information into Hermes and i'm actually going to swap the model back but my preferred model is actually gpt 5.5 so i'm just going to switch the model here we'll switch that to codex and then i can say set up a new model from open router using owl alpha details here it shouldn't be the main model just an option when i select it so now it's actually going to set up owl alpha with Hermes agent we're not going to swap models whilst we're asking it to do this because if it switches to owl alpha whilst you're trying to set up owl alpha then it's just going to break right it's going to stop working and anytime you need to switch models or if this stops working for you whatever then you just type forward slash model inside Hermes agent scroll down enter on the model and then you can just switch between them like that right that's how you do it as you can see it's now setting up open router with the custom model and you just want to make sure you tell it it shouldn't be the main model just an option when i select it otherwise if Hermes switches api midway through it's going to stop working so that would not be great yeah don't do that so you can see it's setting up the custom providers it's adding open router details here the thing that i love about Hermes agent particular i think this is why it's so popular is it can just fix itself it can just improve itself right now this is not going to work first time around always but it is super useful right and it makes everything easy you'll see when it's doing this it doesn't show the api key which is great as well so it doesn't show on the notes which is good sometimes going to have some errors like this but that's basically how you can do this right now you can see it's actually testing it out inside the chat here so it's making sure it actually works so you can tell i don't speak code i can't use code etc but i can tell from the notes what it's working on and how it's improving itself right and also if you have a look at our alpha the number one app being used with our alpha right now is Hermes agent then open claw then claw code you could plug it into all of these if you want and bear in mind it's pretty powerful model like million token context window recently released is free to use etc the other thing that i really like about using Hermes and Hermes agent is that it's really good because it's so easy to switch between models right i don't inside open core every time i switch a model it just breaks it just gives up whereas with this it's way easier and faster so if we go to our open router here can we see our alpha there we go it's right at the top there boom we've got it here nice so we can switch to our alpha as a model here i don't know if it's going to work but let's just test it and there we go right it says hey julian our alpha online running a quick self-test and so now we can use Hermes agent completely for free with our alpha and literally all we did was we just pasted that and put it in there so it's pretty cool pretty good stuff so you now know how to use Hermes agent for free with our alpha and just to recap what is Hermes agent Hermes agent is an open source agent by news research it's really good at self-learning self-iterating and improving all the time right and it's free to download in the store then you've got open router which is free to sign up to and you've got our alpha which is a brand new model on open router it was released on April 28th 2026 it's a high performance foundation model designed specifically for AI agents so it's actually designed for stuff like Hermes which is great and it's got native tool use it's good for long context tasks strong code generation strong automated workflows compatible with Hermes agent and it's free to use right and the biggest apps in the world are currently using it Hermes itself is the number one app using our alpha right now open core is number two so this model has always already been used and has been tested by a lot of people and the cool thing about this is if you were trying to use cloud as an API inside here it'd be pretty expensive but you can use our alpha you don't pay anything so just to recap on this some people want to say free tools are always low quality but our alpha is specifically engineered for agent workflows and it's already been used by Hermes agent and open core with loads of people using it free in 2026 just means open source and community powered not weak other people say I need to be a developer or coder to use AI agents like Hermes but Hermes agent has a user interface anyone can use you just type in plain text here so you type in plain English the agent does the rest I'm not a developer and I use this stuff every single day other people say AI agents will make mistakes and can't be trusted but human employees make mistakes too right everyone makes mistakes that's normal you just train them up give them the right processes and review the work AI agents are the same right obviously I don't have time to learn new tools like Hermes agent but Hermes saves you more time in week one than it takes you to actually set it up we've got lots of community members inside the app offer board and really working on that so that's basically that's how to use it how to set up how to use Hermes agent for free if you want to get a full 30-day roadmap for using this inside your business and also 100 prompts that you can use with Hermes agent and our alpha and a full step-by-step guide you can get that inside the AI profit boarding link in the comments description or just go to the air profitable.com we actually have 157 pages of testimonials from people winning inside this community so you can see some examples right here like lots of people getting great results and that's what we like to see right lots of people just winning the learning and literally there's 157 pages of this stuff which is crazy at this point but we've got 3 000 members in there and a lot of people learning and growing every single day plus you can connect with me personally inside there so if you want to get the full guide on how to use Hermes agent with our alpha you can get that and I'll plug it in over here and there you go you can get the full guide right there with the 30-day roadmap the full cost I have a custom framework on using this stuff called the Goldie infinite agent loop as well we have 100 prompts inside there a 30-day roadmap etc right and we've got loads of training on Hermes rough low and agent swarms how to run local models with Hermes etc this is all inside the AI profit boarding inside the community you can ask questions get help and support in real time on the calendar you can jump a weekly coaching calls share your screen meet with people doing similar stuff inside the classroom you can actually jump on all my best trainings like you see right here and then in the map you can actually meet people in your local area doing similar things to you so feel free to get that link in the description or just go to the AI profitable.com