Model providers and Nous Portal
Hermes is model-agnostic: the agent is one thing, the provider that serves the model is another. Your first decision after installing is which provider to connect — Nous Portal, OpenRouter, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, DeepSeek, xAI, a local Ollama and others are supported.
You can configure several providers at once and switch between them inside a session with /model.
| Route | When to pick it | What to watch |
|---|---|---|
| Nous Portal | When you want many models behind one subscription; it is the route the docs recommend | A subscription model — check the price on the portal site |
| Direct provider (Anthropic, OpenAI, ...) | When you already have a corporate account and key | A separate key and quota per provider |
| OpenRouter | To try many models behind one key | It is an intermediary — requests pass through it |
| Local model (Ollama and similar) | When data must not leave the machine | Context and speed limits; needs capable hardware |
One hard requirement: the docs call for a model with at least 64K tokens of context. The reason follows from the architecture — the system prompt, tool schemas, skill list and conversation history already fill a large part of the window. A small-context model may technically work, but it drops straight into compression and quality suffers.
Two extra mechanisms exist:
- Provider routing — decide exactly which provider handles which work (an expensive model for the main task, a cheap one for auxiliary jobs)
- Fallback providers — automatically move to the next provider when one hits a rate limit
Auxiliary work is configured separately: compression, image analysis, title generation. Routing those to a cheap, fast model is the typical first optimisation — it barely affects output quality and noticeably affects the bill.
Practice. Configure two providers (one main, one cheap auxiliary) and point auxiliary.compression at the cheap one. Done means: hermes config get auxiliary.compression.model returns what you expect, and after one long session hermes insights shows the two models' costs separately.
📚 Sources and documentation
- Nous Portal integrationofficialhermes-agent.nousresearch.com
What the Portal is, how to connect, which models it serves.
- Configuration: providers and auxiliary modelsofficialhermes-agent.nousresearch.com
- Fallback providersofficialhermes-agent.nousresearch.com
- Nous Researchofficialnousresearch.com