Pay for Nous Portal and Hermes Agent with Crypto (2026)
Pay for Nous Research's Nous Portal, Hermes Agent plans and API credits with crypto. Plan prices, how Stripe and Link checkout work, and a card that pays.
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Verified on Virtual for AI & Ad Spend
SolCard customers have successfully paid Nous Research with the Virtual for AI & Ad Spend card (as of October 2026), through Stripe's Link checkout. Top it up with USDT, USDC, USDG, EURC, ETH, BNB, POL, AVAX, HYPE, wBTC, wETH or SOL: $10 for the card, 5% per top-up. Get Virtual for AI & Ad Spend.
Nous Research bills Nous Portal through Stripe, and its pricing page shows only a "Pay with Stripe" button, with no crypto option. To pay from a wallet, top up a crypto-funded card and use it at Stripe's checkout. That covers both the Hermes Agent plans and pay-as-you-go credits.
Nous Portal is the account behind Hermes Agent, Nous Research's open-source agent. One sign-in gives Hermes access to a catalog of 300+ models, hosted tools such as web search and image generation, and cloud hosting for an agent that runs around the clock. This guide covers what the plans cost, how credits differ from included usage, and how to pay with crypto.
- Get a crypto-funded card. Virtual for AI & Ad Spend is a prepaid virtual card you top up with stablecoins or other crypto.
- Create a Nous account at portal.nousresearch.com and open Plans.
- Choose a plan or a credit top-up, then click Pay with Stripe. Enter the card directly, or save it to Link if Stripe offers it.
- Keep the card funded. Plans renew monthly, and cloud hosting and API calls draw on credits.
From the Nous Portal pricing section, October 2026:
| Plan | Price | What's included |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Free models only, standard rate limits, no monthly credits |
| Hermes Plus | $20/month | Hermes Agent usage within daily, weekly and monthly limits; one Cloud agent up to 4 GB RAM and 25 GB disk |
| Hermes Super | $100/month | Higher limits; one Cloud agent up to 4 GB RAM and 100 GB disk |
| Hermes Ultra | $200/month | Highest limits; one Cloud agent up to 8 GB RAM and 100 GB disk |
On every paid plan you can use any model, but large models carry their own monthly limit. Bigger Cloud agents and extra agents are charged to credits.
You can also connect an eligible ChatGPT account for supported inference without a paid Nous plan. Tools and Hermes Cloud hosting are still charged separately in that case.
This is the part people get wrong. A Hermes plan includes agent usage within limits, but API keys always use your credits, never the plan's included usage. Nous says so on every plan card.
Credits are a prepaid dollar balance. The Portal offers top-ups of $10, $20, $50, $100 or $200, or a custom amount, all paid through Stripe. Credits cover:
- Model calls made with an API key
- The Tool Gateway: web search, scraping, image generation, browser use and speech, each priced per use
- Cloud agents larger than your plan's included size, and any extra agents
Model prices are listed per million tokens on the Portal. For example, Claude Sonnet 5.5 shows at $2 input and $10 output per million tokens, and DeepSeek V3.2 at $0.28 and $0.42, in Nous's catalog as of October 2026.
Our view: if you run Hermes as a personal agent, Plus at $20 covers most of the work and you'll rarely touch credits. If you build on the API, skip the plan and top up credits, since the plan's included usage won't apply to your keys anyway.
| What you buy | Card charge | SolCard fee at 5% |
|---|---|---|
| Hermes Plus, monthly | $20 | $1 |
| Hermes Super, monthly | $100 | $5 |
| Credit top-up | $50 | $2.50 |
The 5% applies to each top-up of the card, not to Nous's charge. Add the one-time $10 card fee in your first month. The SolCard dashboard shows the exact cost before you pay.
Nous doesn't publish a decline guide. Stripe runs the checkout, so these are the usual causes on crypto-funded cards:
- Not enough on the card at renewal or at top-up time.
- Stripe's risk rules rejecting the card. Many prepaid cards fail at AI merchants. Virtual for AI & Ad Spend was built for exactly these checkouts, and the successful Nous payments we've seen went through Link.
- Billing details that don't match the card. Use the name and address on your SolCard account.
- Several quick retries. Stripe can block a card after repeated failures. Wait before you try again.
- 3D Secure. Complete the 3D Secure prompt if your first charge asks for it.
If your Cloud agent runs on credits, an empty balance is the bigger risk. Top up before you leave an agent running for days.
SolCard built Virtual for AI & Ad Spend for AI tools, API credits and ad platforms. SolCard customers have paid Nous Research with it, so one card can fund a Hermes plan and the credits behind it.
What it doesn't do: it doesn't make Nous cheaper, and the card is virtual only, with no Apple Pay or Google Pay. If Hermes is one of several model providers you pay for, the same card works on OpenRouter, Claude and Kimi.
Nous Portal's pricing page offers payment through Stripe only, with no crypto option shown. You can pay from a wallet with a crypto-funded card. SolCard customers have paid Nous Research with the Virtual for AI & Ad Spend card as of October 2026.
Hermes Agent itself is open source. On Nous Portal, Hermes Plus is $20 a month, Hermes Super $100 and Hermes Ultra $200, and there is a free tier limited to free models. Each paid plan includes agent usage within limits and one Cloud agent.
No. Nous states that API keys always use your credits on a pay-as-you-go basis, not the plan's included usage. Top up credits separately if you call models through the API.
Credits pay for API calls, the hosted Tool Gateway (search, scraping, image generation, browser use and speech), and Cloud agents beyond your plan's included size. Top-ups start at $10.
Yes. Nous lets you connect an eligible ChatGPT account for supported inference with no paid Nous plan. Tools and Cloud hosting are charged separately.
Nous Portal mixes a subscription and a credit balance, and the split decides what you should pay for. Personal Hermes use belongs on a plan. Anything that runs on an API key or a hosted tool comes out of credits. Either way, Stripe is the only door, and a crypto-funded card is the way to walk through it with funds from your wallet.
- Nous Portal: overview, models and plans
- SolCard payment data, Virtual for AI & Ad Spend card, as of October 2026
