Claudia Ng outlines how to run the open-source Hermes agent for free by pointing it at NVIDIA’s free API tier. She walks through installing the Hermes desktop app, configuring the NVIDIA API key and model (switching from GLM-5.1 to DeepSeek V4 Flash), and enabling web search tools, while noting latency and rate-limit issues on the free tier.

Set up the Tansu broker using SQLite on an AWS t3.micro instance, taking advantage of the AWS Free Tier. The guide covers installation, configuration, and performance testing, demonstrating how to launch a low-cost Kafka-compatible broker for early-stage projects.