Your AI agent on your own machine, from 7.90 euros a month. Hermes Agent, Claude Code or Dify installed and running on delivery, with no graphics card needed.
This is the most common confusion, and an expensive one: people think hosting an AI means running the model. In the vast majority of uses, it does not. What you host is the agent or the interface, a light program that keeps your context, your rules and your access, and sends its questions to a model at Anthropic, OpenAI or Mistral.
That distinction changes everything about the budget. Running a seven-billion-parameter model needs a graphics card and a machine at several hundred euros a month. Running the agent that calls it needs two cores and four gigabytes, which is €7.90 a month. You then pay for the model by usage, at its provider, and you change provider whenever you want.
An agent, Hermes Agent, is driven from a messaging app and acts on your infrastructure. You write to it on Discord, it reads a log, restarts a service, reports back. That is the right choice when you want to delegate actions, not just ask questions.
A coding agent, Claude Code, lives in a terminal: it reads your repository, writes code, runs the tests. On a server the session carries on when you close the laptop. A platform, Dify, is for building: a workflow, a business agent, an internal service wired to your data. That is the right choice when the deliverable is an application, not a conversation.
The listed price is the price of the machine. On top of that comes what you consume at the model provider, and that is the part that varies most: an agent handling a few dozen messages a day stays under a few euros a month, an agent watching and acting continuously goes much higher.
That is exactly the advantage of self-hosting: you see the model bill in front of you, you pick a cheaper model for the simple tasks, and nothing bills you per execution on top. With an all-inclusive service, those two costs are mixed together and you can act on neither.
All on the same machine: an Intel Xeon Gold 6132 Linux VPS, DDR4 ECC and NVMe, with the software already installed and root access kept.
Hermes Agent: For an agent that learns from you · The agent from Nous Research, under an MIT licence. It keeps its memory from one session to the next and writes its own skills from what it has learned. · Persistent memory · Over 16 messaging apps · Hermes 4, Claude or GPT
Claude Code: For coding on the command line · Anthropic's coding agent, in your terminal. You set a big job going, you close the laptop, the session carries on over SSH and you read the diff in the morning. · SSH, tmux, git · Sessions that never stop · Your own Anthropic account
Dify: For building your own applications · The platform for building applications on top of models: workflows, agents, knowledge bases. Nine services running together. · Visual workflows · Vector database included · VPS Edge recommended
No graphics card needed: The agent is light, the model is heavy, and the model runs at the provider. An agent calling Claude therefore runs from €7.90 a month.
Your keys stay with you: API keys, OAuth tokens, conversation history: all of it is written to the disk of your machine, not to a vendor’s server.
Installed and running on delivery: You receive a machine where the software is already running. No docker-compose to debug on a Sunday night, and root access stays yours.
No counters: No billing per execution or per seat. The price is the price of the machine, whatever the number of agents, workflows or users.
Hosting an AI does not mean running a model. In almost every use, what you host is the agent: a light program that keeps your context and your access, and queries a model elsewhere.
Not for these three pieces of software. Hermes Agent, Claude Code and Dify are an agent, a coding agent and a platform: they call a model at a provider and do not run one themselves. Our VPS have no graphics card, and for this use that has no consequence. Running a model locally on these processors works technically but stays too slow for comfortable use.
The Edge VPS at €12.90/month, 6 vCore and 8 GB, is our recommendation for Hermes Agent and Claude Code: an agent’s memory and a repository you compile fill the machine quickly. For Dify, which runs nine services in parallel, that is the minimum tier we recommend.
No. Claude Code requires an Anthropic Pro, Max, Team, Enterprise or Console account, or an API key; the free claude.ai plan does not include access to it. NorthHost resells no access to Claude and is not affiliated with Anthropic. You pay us for the server, and Anthropic for your use of Claude.
Yes. The software is installed on your machine, and your API keys, your OAuth tokens and your history are written to its disk. None of it travels through any NorthHost service. What leaves the machine is the requests you address to the model provider you chose.
Whichever you want, and you can change it. All three accept the Anthropic Claude API, OpenAI, and compatible providers. Hermes Agent explicitly separates the engine from the model, which lets you move from Hermes 4 to Claude or GPT without touching the code.
To get started, no: the software is installed and running on delivery, you receive your credentials and you configure it from its interface or your messaging app. To go further, full root access is left to you, so Linux knowledge becomes useful as soon as you want to add your own services alongside.
The same offer exists for Canada: AI VPS Canada – Host your AI agent in Montreal