free-router Picks Your Best Free Model for Hermes

Running Hermes on free models is easy in theory and annoying in practice. Free tiers rate-limit without warning, some providers go down for hours, and manually pinging each one to check is not something anyone wants to do before their first task of the day.

A small open-source tool called free-router solves exactly this. It is a CLI and TUI that pings NVIDIA NIM and OpenRouter every couple of seconds, tracks live latency and uptime, and ranks what's actually responding right now instead of what's supposed to be free on paper. Run it in non-interactive mode and it just prints the best model ID, ready to drop into a script.

It already knows how to configure itself for Hermes Agent specifically, along with OpenClaw and OpenCode, so you are not hand-editing config files to point at whatever it picks. If your chosen model somehow isn't supported by the target you're running, it falls back to a solid default automatically rather than failing silently.

You need one free API key to get started, either NVIDIA NIM or OpenRouter, and that's the whole cost.

Check it out here: https://github.com/zzragida/free-router

If you're running Hermes on a rotating set of free models already, this is worth setting up once and forgetting about.

What's been your biggest headache with free-tier model rotation so far?