Nous Portal Free Tier (free model pool, $0 / month)
Nous Research
Nous Portal free plan ($0 / month): free models only, standard rate limits, no monthly credits; usable with Hermes Agent or to call free models through the Portal
Verbatim from the FREE tier on the official Portal subscription page: "FREE $0 / Free models only / Standard rate limits / $0 monthly credits"; the paid tier from $20 / month (including a 10% bonus on credits, e.g. $22 monthly credits) is what provides 200+ models and managed tool calling. The official model catalog page has a "FREE" filter, and the text models currently marked free include Space Bunny Alpha, Poolside Laguna S 2.1 and XS 2.1, Ling 3.0 Flash Sante (FREE), Meituan Longcat 2.5 Preview, and StepFun Step 3.7 Flash, plus a "Free Models" group listing Ling 3.0 Flash Fin, Ling 3.1 Flash, and more.
The free model pool rotates with official partnerships and promotions; official tweets have shown free offers such as Solar Pro 4 and Ox Alpha that went offline after expiring, and the list above is a snapshot of the page on 2026-10-02; the specific free allowance figures are not published by the official source, which only says "Standard rate limits". In the free pool read this time (only the first 50 entries of the page's pagination were read), popular models such as DeepSeek, GLM, and Kimi do not appear; they are on the paid tier with a 50%–80% discount price tag. The sign-up entry is the official "Create Nous Account", and the sign-up method and whether a card is required were not verified by completing sign-up. Reachability from mainland China was not tested.