Nous Portal API: access, keys and failover

What is free on Nous

Nous documents Portal as a subscription: you sign up and pick a plan. Its public model list includes models priced at 0, but the pages we could load do not document whether a free account can call them. Ficelle filters Nous catalog rows for zero pricing; you must still confirm that your Portal plan permits API access to the selected model.

Nous free-tier limits

We could not verify Nous Portal rate limits on an official page we were able to load, so we do not publish numbers here. Check the limits shown in your Portal account.

Get a Nous API key

Create a Nous Portal account and manage your plan and key from the portal. Hermes Agent can also sign in to Portal with OAuth.

https://portal.nousresearch.com/

OpenAI compatibility

Portal speaks OpenAI-compatible chat completions. OpenRouter-specific extensions (provider routing preferences, session ids, top-level cache control) are not part of its contract.

https://inference-api.nousresearch.com/v1

Before you rely on it

• A zero-price catalog row does not establish a no-subscription entitlement. Check the selected model against your Portal plan before relying on it.
• Some Portal models are served through OpenRouter, and routing for a model can change.
• Nous says Hermes 4 70B and 405B are chat and reasoning models, not recommended for agentic tool-calling loops.

Use Nous with automatic failover

Ficelle can include Nous behind your local OpenAI-compatible endpoint when the integration is enabled and its models pass free-access and capability checks. Nous is a Core reference provider. Configure access and confirm your account can use the selected models. Another eligible candidate must be available for failover to succeed. Local routing guards do not control upstream billing when an account permits paid usage beyond its free allocation. See strict-zero routing and account limits.

ficelle set-key nous      # hidden prompt, stored locally
ficelle doctor --text          # check provider configuration; account access is separate

from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(base_url="http://127.0.0.1:8646/v1", api_key="ficelle-local")

# Ficelle selects among configured, enabled, eligible models.
# If none can serve the request, it returns an error.
client.chat.completions.create(
    model="ficelle/auto-tools",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "..."}],
)

Pick a model type

Choose a model type for your request. Eligibility depends on the installed provider configuration, catalog data, free-access evidence and capability checks. A catalog listing alone does not confirm that your account can call a model.

• Tool calling
• JSON & structured output
• Fast, low-latency
• Reasoning
• Coding assistants
• Agent orchestration
• Long context
• Context compression
• Vision
• Audio input
• Video input
• Multimodal

Questions