Price
Both apps cost nothing. What you pay for is the AI underneath.
Turnstone is free on the Mac with no card. It sells no credits and adds no meter: use counts against the ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok or Cursor plan you sign in with, or you pay the provider per use with an API key. The one paid product, Turnstone Cloud at $49 a month, is still a waitlist; Turnstone says the first 1,000 people get their first month free. A "Turnstone AI" option for people without a subscription is mentioned with no price.
Hermes Agent is free, MIT-licensed software. You can bring your own provider, or use Nous Portal: a free tier with free models, then Plus at $20, Super at $100 and Ultra at $200 a month, which bundle 300+ models plus web search, image generation, text-to-speech and a cloud browser. Hermes Cloud hosts an always-on agent, billed per day of uptime (storage only when stopped) with inference on top; deploying needs $2 in credit or an active subscription.
Bottom line: both are free to start. Turnstone is cheaper to reason about if you already have a plan; Hermes gives you more ways to pay, including hosting today.
Using the AI plan you already pay for
This is the question most people searching the pair are asking, and the answer depends on which plan you have.
| Your plan | Turnstone | Hermes Agent |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | Yes, through OpenAI's Codex app and login | Yes, ChatGPT OAuth with Codex models |
| Claude Pro | Yes, through Claude Code | No; use a pay-per-token API key instead |
| Claude Max | Yes, through Claude Code | Only extra usage credits; the base allowance is never used |
| Grok | Yes, your Grok account | Yes, SuperGrok or X Premium+ sign-in |
| Gemini | Yes, your Gemini account | API key or Google Vertex AI |
| Local models | Ollama | Ollama, LM Studio, llama.cpp, vLLM and others |
Hermes also connects to dozens of other providers and OpenRouter. Turnstone covers fewer, but each one is a sign-in rather than a key.
Where it runs
Turnstone is a Mac app for Apple silicon and Intel. It runs Agents on your Mac with each provider's own tooling, and its Schedules run only while the app is open. Turnstone Cloud, an iPhone app and a web app are coming soon; Windows, Linux and Android aren't available.
Hermes Agent runs almost anywhere: desktop packages for macOS and Windows, a one-line installer for Linux, macOS and WSL2, native Windows through PowerShell, and Android through Termux. It can also live on a $5 VPS, a GPU cluster or a serverless backend that hibernates when idle, or on Hermes Cloud.
Bottom line: if you're not on a Mac, or want an agent that's on all night, Hermes is the only one of the two that does it today.
How you talk to it
Turnstone is an app with a sidebar of named Agents. Your first Agent, the Chief of Staff, sets up one per job, and any Agent can hand work to another. Agents work across 60+ built-in apps such as Gmail, Outlook, Slack, Notion, LinkedIn, iMessage and WhatsApp, their own browser tab and the apps on your Mac, and they can send email, Slack messages and iMessages from your own accounts.
Hermes Agent has a full terminal interface and a desktop app, and one gateway process puts it in Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal and email, with voice memo transcription. It can spawn isolated subagents to work in parallel.
Memory and skills
Both remember you, and both turn repeated work into reusable skills.
Turnstone's Brain is one memory shared by all Agents, stored as plain files on your Mac and organized into areas such as About You, People, Timeline and Work. You can browse and edit it in the app. An Agent may propose a Skill after repeatable work; nothing is saved until you review it.
Hermes keeps two small files, MEMORY.md (about 2,200 characters of its own notes) and USER.md (about 1,375 characters about you), and searches past sessions when it needs more. Its headline feature is a learning loop: it creates skills on its own after complex tasks and improves them as it uses them, in a format compatible with the agentskills.io standard. Memory plugins such as Honcho and Mem0 add more.
Bottom line: Turnstone's memory is easier to see and correct; Hermes does more on its own.
Safety and privacy
Approvals. Turnstone sets a permission level per Agent: Read only, Ask first or Always Allow, with some sensitive connected-app actions still reviewed. New Schedules and Skills show a review card first. Hermes asks before running a shell command that matches its list of dangerous patterns; approval modes are configurable, and scheduled or unattended runs can auto-approve. Allowlists and DM pairing control who can message it, and container backends add isolation.
Data. Turnstone says your prompts go from your Mac straight to your chosen provider under your account, never through its servers, and that your Brain, files and API keys stay on your Mac; connected apps are authorized through Composio. Hermes is self-hosted, so your data goes wherever you run it and to the provider you pick; Nous Portal offers a Privacy Mode that opts out of storing and training on certain inference data.
Code. Hermes Agent's code is public under the MIT license. Turnstone's isn't.
Who makes them
Turnstone comes from Crow Inc. in San Francisco, founded by Aryan Vij and Jai Bhatia in Y Combinator's Winter 2026 batch; it says its funding was led by Y Combinator and others, without an amount. Hermes Agent is built by Nous Research and ships frequent releases on GitHub. Turnstone also publishes its own comparison with Hermes; this one draws on both makers' documentation rather than either side's pitch.