Claudia Ng wanted to test Hermes, an open-source agent with persistent memory and tool access, without paying for a portal subscription. She first tried running a local model on her Mac but hit a context-window limit—Hermes needs at least 64,000 tokens for tool loops and her machine couldn’t handle that. Instead, she switched to NVIDIA’s free API tier. After creating a free NVIDIA Developer account, she grabbed an API key, pointed Hermes at the NVIDIA endpoint, and chose from roughly 49 available models. Setup took only a few terminal commands: installing the Hermes desktop app, configuring the NVIDIA provider with `hermes model`, and enabling web search via `hermes tools enable web`. Initially she picked GLM-5.1 by Z.ai for its strong tool-calling and long-reasoning capabilities, but frequent timeouts and heavy reasoning overhead ate through the free tier quickly. She then moved to DeepSeek V4 Flash, which responds faster and uses shorter reasoning traces. The free tier works for exploring Hermes—every tool call adds a round trip and expands the prompt, so sessions can stall once you hit the rate limit—but it costs nothing to experiment. Claudia plans to test more hands-off, bounded tasks over the next few weeks to see if NVIDIA’s free inference can support a light production use.