Model Provider for Hermes

I am new at using at but I am learning (slowly) and I wanted to explore Hermes. I am currently using Claude to manage my education tracking where it keeps my AuDHD brain on track, helps with education pathing, generates practicals based on the subjects I am currently covering, and quizzes me regularly to ensure I fully understand the material before moving on to another module.

I would also like to start creating some automations for my work (python scripts and such to mitigate brainless grunt work) and explore what I can feasibly automate in my field.

I also want to explore personal automation to handle tasks outside of work, making grocery lists, home automation, etc.

My question is, in your opinion, should I go for a subscription model for a LLM provider (like Nous) or a pay per use model like OpenRouter? I could also run something local but I only have 8gb of vram (NVIDIA 5070) to work with.

I can upgrade in the future to a Mac Studio once I prove that this is a useful solution for me and for my work.

I read that Hermes can have different profiles to handle these different paths, but I don’t know too much about it other than “it learns and gets better over time” which is really appealing to me.

Thank you in advance.