Nous: Hermes 3 405B Instruct (free)
Analysis Summary
Nous Hermes 3 405B Instruct is a large instruction-tuned model from Nous Research, available here on a free tier. The 405B parameter count suggests substantial capacity, and the 131K context window is generous. However, no benchmark data is available, so reasoning, coding, and instruction-following quality cannot be assessed objectively.
For businesses, the free tier makes it a low-risk option for internal experimentation and prototyping. Without benchmark evidence, it should not be deployed in client-facing or production workflows without thorough internal testing. The lack of tool use or function calling support further limits its utility in structured pipelines.
Teams curious about large open-weight models for content generation or summarisation tasks can explore it at no cost. Any production adoption should be preceded by rigorous quality evaluation against benchmarked alternatives.
Assessed June 6, 2026
Editorial notes
Nous Hermes 3 405B Instruct (free tier) has no benchmark data and no pricing, making capability assessment impossible, though the free access makes it worth evaluating for low-stakes experimentation.
Rankings consider pricing, capabilities, benchmarks, and real-world applicability and are refreshed as new models launch. Feedback?
Performance Profile
How Nous: Hermes 3 405B Instruct (free) compares
Its 131K-token context window is larger than 59% of the models we list. Nous: Hermes 3 405B Instruct (free) is currently free to use via OpenRouter.
About Nous: Hermes 3 405B Instruct (free)
Hermes 3 is a generalist language model with many improvements over Hermes 2, including advanced agentic capabilities, much better roleplaying, reasoning, multi-turn conversation, long context coherence, and improvements across the..
Architecture Detail
| Instruct Type | chatml |
How does Nous: Hermes 3 405B Instruct (free) stack up?
Compare side-by-side with other legacy models.
Model Information
| OpenRouter ID |
nousresearch/hermes-3-llama-3.1-405b:free
|
| Provider | nousresearch |
| Release Date | August 16, 2024 |
| Context Length | 131,072 tokens |
| Status | Active |
Live Performance
Live endpoint metrics, refreshed every 30 minutes.
External Resources
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Frequently asked questions about Nous: Hermes 3 405B Instruct (free)
How much does Nous: Hermes 3 405B Instruct (free) cost?
Nous: Hermes 3 405B Instruct (free) is currently available for free via OpenRouter.
What is the context window of Nous: Hermes 3 405B Instruct (free)?
Nous: Hermes 3 405B Instruct (free) has a context window of 131,072 tokens (131K).
Who created Nous: Hermes 3 405B Instruct (free)?
Nous: Hermes 3 405B Instruct (free) is developed by Nous and was released on August 16, 2024.
Data sourced from OpenRouter API, Artificial Analysis and Hugging Face Open LLM Leaderboard. Scores are editorially curated by our team.
Last updated: June 9, 2026 9:57 pm