Hey,

I get the same question over and over: "How much do you actually pay for your Hermes setup?"

So let me be honest: about $22 a month. One user wrote me he's paying $3 a day. Almost ten times more, for the same agent.

The difference isn't a better model. It's three small things almost nobody does. I'm sharing them with you first, before I post this anywhere this is the exclusive, extended guide to drastically reducing your Hermes costs, only for my newsletter subscribers.

1. The 1300-character wall (the real reason your agent "forgets")

Hermes memory is capped at 2200 characters. When it's full, your agent gets bloated and slow or it drops old info to make room. And that's exactly when it starts to feel dumb. It's not the model. It's a full memory file.

Paste this:

1. Set the memory limit to 1300 characters.

2. Read my memory file. How far over the limit is it? Which entries belong in skills?

3. List my cron jobs. Which ones run but never produce anything, and which ones are bloated?

4. Check which tools and skills load every turn but never get used.

5. Give me a numbered list of what to change I'll say "do 1, do 3" and you implement it. Also list all skills and tools which never get used and offer to temporarily disable them.

The fix takes two minutes: set the memory limit to 1300 characters and move what matters into skills. Want your agent to find the waste itself?

2. Tool bloat is eating your money silently

Every tool Hermes loads costs tokens not just when you use it, on every single response. Cron jobs are the worst: by default they load everything. Browser, social tools, computer_use. A job that just needs files and web pays for all of it.

Give your cron jobs only what they need:

enabled_toolsets: ["web", "terminal"]

That one line cut a real chunk off my bill.

3. Tell your agent to be cheaper

Sounds silly. Works. I regularly tell mine: "Make this tool cheaper. Keep an eye on token cost." It knows its own behavior it finds the loops, the repeated calls, the tools loaded too often. It just never volunteers it.

These three alone took me from $2 a day to about $0.50.

Enjoy. And if you try the memory prompt, tell me what your agent found. I read every reply.

— Holme Bengt