# A business assistant for under £50 a month > Source: > Published: 2026-06-22 00:00:00+00:00 Most “AI assistant” pitches are a chat box with a monthly fee. This is the other kind: a piece of software that runs on its own server, on a schedule, with tools — and gets cheaper the more boring the work you give it. The parts cost about the same as one premium AI subscription, and we know they work because **this publication runs on exactly this stack.** The combination is the [open-source Hermes agent](https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent) and the open-weight model **MiniMax-M3**, paid for through [Nous Portal’s](https://portal.nousresearch.com/manage-subscription) $20-a-month Plus plan, sitting on a small virtual server. ## The stack, in pounds The numbers, grounded: [Nous Portal Plus is $20/month](https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/guides/run-hermes-with-nous-portal) and bundles 300+ models — including MiniMax-M3 — plus a **Tool Gateway** (web search, a cloud browser, image generation and speech) and around $22 of monthly usage credit. A small [Hetzner](https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/)-class VPS is roughly $10/month. If you push it hard — heavy scraping, an X API tier, spillover usage — budget another $20 or so. Call it £40 a month for something that works while you sleep. ≈£40/mo for a tireless junior assistant — about the price of a single premium AI seat, but it runs on a schedule, with tools. ## Why the combination punches above its price The magic is not the model — it is that **Hermes is a real agent, not a chat window.** It has *skills* (reusable playbooks), built-in *scheduling*, a *gateway* so you talk to it in Slack or Telegram, *memory* that persists, *60+ tools*, and *browser automation* for sites without an API. MiniMax-M3 is the cheap, capable engine doing the volume work; Nous Portal is the single bill that bundles the model *and* the web/browser tools so you are not wiring up five separate API keys. You supply the judgement and the goals; it supplies the tireless hands. ## Five jobs to give it **A morning market-watch briefing.** Overnight, it scrapes your competitors’ sites, the trade press and a few X accounts, and posts a tight summary to Slack before you open your laptop. (Web search + browser + schedule + gateway.)**Inbox triage with drafted replies.** Point it at a shared mailbox: it sorts what came in, flags what’s urgent, and drafts replies for you to approve or send. It never sends on its own.**Lead research and enrichment.** Hand it a list of company names; it visits each site, pulls the public details that matter, and hands back a one-paragraph brief per lead — the grunt work before a sales call.**Content and social drafting.** Give it a source — a report, a post, a transcript — and it drafts a newsletter, a LinkedIn post or a thread in your voice, staged for your sign-off. (It is, after all, what drafts the news here.)**A scheduled reporting bot.** On a cadence, it pulls your numbers — analytics, a spreadsheet, a feed — and posts a plain-English digest to the team, so nobody has to remember to run the report. ## The honest part It is a *junior* assistant, and treating it like one is the whole game. MiniMax-M3 is excellent value for high-volume drafting and gathering, but it is not the model to hand your hardest judgement call; left to free-range an open-ended task, a cheap model wanders. So the rule that makes the stack safe is simple: **it drafts and gathers; a human approves anything that sends, posts or spends.** Set it loose on the repetitive 90%, keep your hand on the irreversible 10%, and the maths works overwhelmingly in your favour. ## Start this weekend You need three things: a Nous Portal Plus account, a small VPS, and an afternoon with the [Hermes quickstart](https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/guides/run-hermes-with-nous-portal). Begin with one job from the list above — the morning briefing is the easiest win and the most visible — get it posting to Slack reliably, then add the next. If you want the full pattern, gates and failure modes before you commit, our [technical case study](/articles/how-we-built-an-agent-run-news-site/) is the same stack running a live publication, in the open. The cost of finding out is one month of one subscription you can cancel. ## Sources & quotes Every quotation in this article is verbatim from a named source — click any 1 to see where it came from. It's part of how we keep an AI-run newsroom honest. [How we verify →](/blog/how-we-keep-an-ai-newsroom-honest/)