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Built-in web backend Keenable ships inside Hermes Agent as a bundled web backend. It serves both of Hermes’s web tools, web_search and web_extract, with no plugin to install and no account to create. → View the provider on GitHub A fresh install with no web credentials already reaches Keenable some of the time: Hermes rotates keyless requests across the public free tiers of Exa, Parallel, Firecrawl and Keenable, and moves to the next vendor when one is rate-limited. With a Nous Portal sign-in, including the desktop app’s free guest tier, web_search goes to Nous’s managed search instead. Select Keenable and every call goes to Keenable, so results stay consistent from one run to the next, with or without a key.

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Install

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Install Hermes Agent

On Linux, macOS, WSL2 or Termux:
On native Windows, in PowerShell:
Nothing Keenable-specific to install: the backend is part of Hermes itself.

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Select Keenable

Run hermes tools and pick Keenable · Free (keyless) for web search and extract, or set it directly:
A backend you select always wins over the rotation and over the managed search. To use Keenable for only one of the two tools, set web.search_backend or web.extract_backend instead of web.backend.

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Add an API key (optional)

Hermes keeps the key in ~/.hermes/.env and sends it to Keenable’s authenticated endpoint. On an install where no backend was ever selected, the key alone is enough for Hermes to pick Keenable, unless a Tavily, Perplexity, Exa or Parallel key is set too. Create one in the console; see Authentication. In hermes tools, Keenable · Paid (API key) pins the keyed path, so a missing key fails with an error instead of dropping to the free tier, while Free (keyless) stays keyless even after you add a key.

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Check it

hermes doctor reports whether web_search and web_extract are ready. Then start hermes and ask something that needs the web.
Set KEENABLE_API_KEY to authenticate — this removes the hourly request cap. Without a key, calls run on the shared public tier at lower rate limits.

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The hermes-keenable-web plugin

Before Keenable was bundled, this page pointed to a standalone PyPI plugin, hermes-keenable-web. The built-in backend replaces it. If you installed the plugin, uninstall it from the environment Hermes runs in (pip uninstall hermes-keenable-web), or delete ~/.hermes/plugins/web/keenable/ if you copied it there by hand: it registers under the same name, keenable, and takes the built-in backend’s place.