Nous Tool Gateway — 300+ Models | Easy Understand Hermes Agent

Nous Tool Gateway — 300+ Models

Remember the old days of stitching together five different API subscriptions just to make your agent useful? You’d sign up for Firecrawl here, FAL there, OpenAI for audio, Browser Use for browser automation… each with its own billing, rate limits, and quirks. It was a mess.

The Tool Gateway fixes that. It’s included with every paid Nous Portal subscription, and it routes Hermes’ tool calls — web search, image generation, text-to-speech, and cloud browser automation — through infrastructure Nous already runs. One subscription. Every tool built in. No extra signups.

What’s inside

Here’s what the gateway gives you:

Web search & extract — Agent-grade search and full-page extraction, managed by Nous. No rate limits to worry about; the gateway handles scaling.
Image generation — One Nous Subscription row spanning the FAL catalog, the native Krea models, and Nous Portal image models: Krea 3, FLUX 2, GPT Image, Nano Banana, Seedream, Ideogram, Recraft, Qwen, Krea 2, and more. Pick the model once in hermes tools, which shows the live list.
Text-to-speech — OpenAI TTS voices wired into the text_to_speech tool. Drop voice notes into Telegram, generate audio for pipelines, narrate anything.
Cloud browser automation — Headless cloud Chromium sessions via Browser Use, driven by browser_exec over CDP — no Browserbase account required.

All four are pay-as-you-use, billed against your Nous subscription. Mix and match freely — run the gateway for web and images while keeping your own ElevenLabs key for TTS, or route everything through Nous.

Why it exists

Building an agent that can actually do things used to mean juggling multiple API subscriptions. The gateway collapses that into one account:

One bill. Pay Nous; we handle the rest.
One signup. No web search, FAL, Browser Use, or OpenAI audio accounts to manage.
One key. Your Nous Portal OAuth covers every tool.
Same quality. Same backends the direct-key route uses — just fronted by us.

Bring your own keys anytime, per-tool, whenever you want. The gateway isn’t a lock-in; it’s a shortcut.

Getting started

Three ways in — pick whichever fits where you are:

hermes setup --portal     # Fresh install: Nous OAuth + set Nous as provider + turn on the Tool Gateway in one go

hermes model              # Switch your inference provider to Nous Portal — Hermes then offers to turn on the gateway for all tools

hermes tools              # Enable the gateway per-tool — pick "Nous Subscription" for any tool you want

hermes setup --portal and hermes model are the all-at-once paths: log in once, optionally flip every tool to the gateway. hermes tools is the à la carte path — turn on just the tools you want, one at a time.

You don’t have to log in first. With hermes tools, the Nous-managed backends (Web search, Image, Video, TTS, Browser) are always listed, even if you’ve never signed into Nous Portal. Select one and Hermes runs the Portal login right there if you aren’t already authenticated. This path only logs you in and turns on the one tool you picked — it does not switch your inference provider.

Checking what’s active

hermes portal info        # Portal auth + Tool Gateway routing summary
hermes portal tools       # Gateway catalog with current routing per tool
hermes status --full      # Full system status (Tool Gateway is one section)

hermes portal info shows something like:

◆ Nous Tool Gateway
  Nous Portal     ✓ managed tools available
  Web tools       ✓ active via Nous subscription
  Image gen       ✓ active via Nous subscription
  TTS             ✓ active via Nous subscription
  Browser         ○ active via Browser Use key

Tools marked “active via Nous subscription” go through the gateway. Anything else uses your own keys.

Eligibility and the free pool

The Tool Gateway is a paid-subscription feature. Free-tier accounts can use Portal for inference but don’t include managed tools. Upgrade your plan to unlock the gateway.

Some accounts are also entitled to a free tool pool — a small managed-tool allowance that covers gateway tool calls without a paid subscription. When available, the gateway surfaces it and shows a setup prompt on first use.

Smart defaults

Picking a Nous model (hermes model) offers a per-tool checklist of gateway backends. It respects your existing setup:

Tools you’ve explicitly pointed at another backend (e.g. web.backend: searxng, browser.cloud_provider: browserbase) are never offered — your selection can’t be accidentally overwritten.
Tools configured via environment variables alone (e.g. SEARXNG_URL, BROWSER_USE_API_KEY) are offered unchecked, labeled to keep your own backend.
Only genuinely unconfigured tools come pre-checked.
Declines stick: if you submit the checklist with a tool unchecked, it won’t be pre-checked on future Nous model swaps.

More image models

The Nous Subscription row has one model picker that lists every model once. The model is chosen once, in hermes tools → Image Generation, and stored in config.yaml as image_gen.model. Every image_generate call uses that stored model — the tool has no model parameter, so there is no per-call override. Leave it unset and a paid subscription gets Krea 3; the free tool pool gets FLUX 2 Klein 9B.

The stored id decides which gateway serves the request: a native Krea id (krea-3, krea-2-medium, krea-2-large, krea-2-medium-turbo) goes to the Krea gateway, a FAL catalog id goes to FAL, and any other id goes to Nous Portal. The selection is still just image_gen.provider: nous plus the model id.

Krea 3 (generates and edits existing images — up to 4 reference images, thinking and resolution controls), Krea 2 (Medium, Large, Medium Turbo — up to 10 style-reference images, optional Enhance upscale) and the Nous Portal image models sit in that same picker rather than behind rows of their own. They need a paid subscription — the free tool pool funds the FAL models only. The Krea-via-FAL ids (fal-ai/krea/v2/...) stay on the direct FAL.ai row. If the Krea gateway refuses a request before starting a job (unreachable, or 429 after the gateway’s own retries), Hermes reruns it on the FAL default model and the result says so in fallback_from; set image_gen.krea.fallback_to_fal: false to turn that off. Requests with source images never fall back.

Model ids, speeds, and prices live on the Image Generation page. The set evolves — hermes tools → Image Generation shows the current live list.

Multiple connector accounts

Connectors are hosted apps such as Gmail that the agent reaches through the Nous tool gateway (see Tool Search → Connectors). You can connect two or more accounts of one app, for example a Gmail home and a Gmail work.

Names. Each account has a name of 1 to 32 characters: lowercase letters, digits or -, starting with a letter or digit. An unnamed account shows the app’s own account label.
No default. No account is the default. When you ask the agent to use an app with several named accounts, it must say which one.
The agent names new accounts. It picks the name from what you said and asks if it is unsure. It then tells you the name it chose, for example “Hermes named this Gmail account work. Rename it anytime.” The desktop app, the TUI and the classic CLI show that line.
Rename. Rename an account anytime, or ask the agent to. Renaming needs a Nous Portal version that supports it; until then you see “This Nous Portal cannot rename connector accounts yet.”
Reconnect deletes nothing. Reconnecting a broken account replaces it with a new one under the same name. The old one is kept as retired (disabled). Retired accounts stay listed but folded away.
Remove is yours. You remove an account yourself, one at a time. The agent never removes one.

Once a connector has two or more active accounts, every tool of that connector takes a connector_alias field whose allowed values are your account names. The field is required when every active account is named and optional when some are unnamed.

If the agent leaves it out when several accounts are named, or names one that does not exist, the call fails and the error lists the valid names. A result reports the account it ran under when that account is named; for an unnamed account the field is absent.

Manage accounts in any of these places:

The desktop app’s Connectors page.
The TUI: /connectors (see Slash Commands).
The CLI: hermes connectors (see CLI Commands).
Nous Portal.

Mixing your own key and the gateway (web only)

Web search and web extract can each choose their own route. In the desktop app, open Capabilities → Tools → Web Search & Scraping: Use for Search / Use for Extract on the Nous Subscription row sends that capability through the gateway, and the same buttons on a direct row (e.g. Firecrawl) send it through your own key. The Search: / Extract: pills at the top show which route each one takes right now. In config.yaml the managed choice is the value nous on the per-capability key:

web:
  search_backend: firecrawl   # your FIRECRAWL_API_KEY
  extract_backend: nous       # the Nous Tool Gateway (managed Firecrawl)

Picking Nous Subscription for the whole tool (or running hermes tools) clears both per-capability keys, so search and extract both go back through the gateway.

The gateway is per-tool. Turn it on for just what you want, or route everything through Nous. One subscription, every tool built in.