Builds / Hermes Desk with Hands
Hermes Desk with Hands
A self-hosted Hermes agent on Telegram that searches the live web, remembers, and acts in 1,500+ apps.
Intermediate build · Personal agents · 7 parts · Running cost: $4/mo + model usage
Every part here is yours to choose and to pay for separately: the shell, the model behind it, the channel you message it from, the search provider, the hands, the memory and the server. That is the trade a kit makes against a bundle — more to set up, nothing locked.
Kit. You pick every part and run it yourself. Any model, any server, any search — and the bill is the sum of the parts.
A Hermes agent you message from Telegram that reads the live web through Exa, keeps a memory, and acts in your apps through one Composio MCP endpoint — all on a server you control.
First-run setup: about 60 minutes.
What drives the cost: Hosting from about $4 a month, model usage per token, and Exa and Composio both start free and meter above that.
Recommended after Dots Desk.
The parts
Agent shell
Hermes Agent — Agent. MIT-licensed personal-agent platform: CLI, messaging gateway, plugins, any OpenAI-compatible model.
Brain
Claude Sonnet 5 — Model. Any provider; you bring the API key. Sonnet 5 is the price-to-quality middle.
Alternatives: DeepSeek V4, Claude Opus 5.5
Channel
Options: Telegram (The quickest first channel to set up); WhatsApp; Slack; Discord; Email (IMAP and SMTP) (Hermes answers mail as a conversation). Where you talk to the agent. Both shells speak 50-plus channels; pick the one your phone already has.
Web search
Exa — Tool. Hermes auto-detects the provider from the API key you set. Firecrawl is its default; Exa is a first-party plugin too.
Alternatives: Firecrawl, Perplexity AI
Hands
Composio — Skill. Composio's MCP server gives the agent managed-auth access to 1,500-plus apps; free up to 100k tool calls a month.
Memory (optional)
Mem0 — Tool. Hermes has a memory store of its own; mem0 adds one shared across agents.
Runs on
Hetzner — Service. A small VPS is enough to keep the gateway up around the clock.
Alternatives: IDCloudHost, Hostinger
Run this build
Start the build and it becomes a checklist: for each part, mark the one you already have, pick an alternative of a kind the slot takes, or compare the options side by side; for a plan, a channel or a policy, choose one of the options. Every part you confirm goes onto your stack, and the build is complete when every required part is filled.
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Not sure this is the right one? Run Smart Match or browse all builds.