The best Hermes community claim only holds up if you've actually tested the alternatives, so this article is the long version of what I found after 18 months of trying basically every Hermes group I could get into.
I want to do this one differently.
Instead of just telling you which Hermes community to join, I'm going to walk you through every option I tried, what each one was actually like inside, and why I kept coming back to one specific group.
If you're the kind of buyer who reads three reviews before picking a kettle, this is the article for you.
I tested free Discords.
I tested big-name paid AI communities.
I tested niche Hermes-focused Skool groups.
I tested generic AI accelerators.
I tested my own free community.
I came back to the AI Profit Boardroom every single time.
Here's why.
The verdict after testing. The best Hermes community in 2026 is the AI Profit Boardroom — 3,000+ members, 5 weekly live calls, the full Hermes bonus stack (Money Machine, 10K Blueprint, Quick Deploy Kit, 30 Day Roadmap, Swarm Playbook), $59/mo locked forever, twin guarantee. → Try it here
The criteria I used
Before I score anything, here's the rubric I judged each community against.
Active member count.
Quality of live coaching, if any.
Hermes-specific learning content.
Hermes-specific monetisation content.
Founder access and accountability.
Bonus assets and templates.
Refund and risk policy.
Signal-to-noise ratio inside the chat.
Searchability and archive quality.
Onboarding speed for new members.
I scored each community out of 10 on each of those.
The Boardroom didn't win every single category.
But it won the overall by a wider margin than I expected when I started this comparison.
Alternative 1 — Free Hermes Discords
I joined a stack of these.
Some were huge — 8,000-15,000 members.
The energy was there.
The volume was there.
The actual usable signal?
Patchy at best.
Most messages were "anyone got the new build working" or "wat hardware u running."
The pinned messages were stale.
There were no structured paths.
No coaching.
No bonuses.
No accountability.
If you've been to a free crypto Telegram from 2017, you've felt this vibe.
Score: 3/10. Useful for quick technical answers, useless for everything else.
Alternative 2 — Free Reddit threads
Reddit is the second free option people land on.
r/LocalLLaMA and similar.
The threads can be high-quality — there are genuinely smart people answering.
But it's still anonymous, asynchronous, and unstructured.
You'll learn things over time.
You won't learn them in any particular order.
You won't get personal coaching.
And the moment you ask anything monetisation-adjacent, you get told to "go away with your get-rich-quick stuff" by people who haven't shipped a thing in years.
Score: 4/10. Good for benchmarks and news, bad for builders.
Alternative 3 — YouTube comment sections
I'm a YouTuber so I'll be honest about my own medium.
YouTube comments are not a community.
They're a feedback channel.
The big Hermes-focused YouTubers don't have time to reply to every comment.
You can occasionally get a useful answer from another commenter, but it's lottery.
Some YouTubers (myself included) have a Skool community attached precisely because we know YouTube comments aren't a real community channel.
Score: 2/10. Treat YouTube as the discovery layer, not the community layer.
Alternative 4 — Generic paid AI communities at $99-299/mo
There are loads of these now.
I joined three of them as a paying member to test.
They're better than free Discords because at least there's some structure and some moderation.
But almost none of them go deep on Hermes specifically.
They cover Hermes as one option among many.
If you ask about a specific Hermes deployment issue, you'll get a general "have you tried X?" answer.
The bonuses are mostly generic AI bonuses — ChatGPT prompt packs, GPT wrappers, that kind of thing.
The live coaching is usually 1-2 calls per month, max.
The price feels excessive for the actual depth you get.
Score: 5/10. Better than free, but you're paying a premium for breadth you don't need.
Alternative 5 — Niche Hermes-focused Skool groups
There are a few of these now.
Some are run by smart people who genuinely know Hermes.
They tend to be smaller — a few hundred members at most.
The content is often good for specific use cases.
But the volume of bonuses and the depth of monetisation guidance just isn't there.
Most of them haven't built an actual business off the back of Hermes themselves, so the monetisation conversations stay theoretical.
And the live coaching cadence is usually weekly at most — not five times a week.
Score: 6/10. Useful, but underpowered for serious builders.
Alternative 6 — One-off Hermes courses ($497-$2,000)
Static courses are the opposite of a community.
You buy.
You watch.
You implement (maybe).
You're done.
There's no community to ask questions in.
There's no live coaching to debug your specific stack.
And Hermes is moving fast enough that any static course is partly outdated within 3 months.
If you've got the budget for a $497 course, you've got the budget for 8 months of the Boardroom at $59/mo, and you'll get vastly more value.
Score: 4/10. Static content + no community = wrong format for an actively evolving framework.
Alternative 7 — My own Free AI Money Lab
I'd be a hypocrite not to include this one.
The Free AI Money Lab is my free Skool community.
It has a free AI course, 1,000 free AI agents, and a smaller community vibe.
It's genuinely useful for testing the Skool format, learning the basics, and earning your first revenue.
But it's the free version on purpose.
It doesn't include the 5 weekly live coaching calls.
It doesn't include the Hermes Money Machine, the 10K Blueprint, the Quick Deploy Kit, the 30 Day Roadmap, the Swarm Playbook, or any of the deeper Hermes assets.
It doesn't include the daily Q&A with personal responses or the custom video tutorials.
It doesn't unlock the 100+ private automation library or the 1,000+ done-for-you workflows.
It's the on-ramp, not the destination.
Score: 6/10. Excellent free starting point, but you outgrow it.
Alternative 8 — AI Profit Boardroom (the winner)
This is where I ended up after testing all the above.
Some of the criteria I scored it on.
Members
3,000+ active builders.
Not lurkers — active.
Daily posting, daily wins, daily questions.
Live coaching
5 calls per week.
Not 5 per month.
Five per week.
You can drop into multiple calls per week and get personal attention.
I also do daily Q&A with personal responses, and I record custom video tutorials for members who need a deeper walk-through on their specific problem.
Hermes-specific bonus stack
This is where the Boardroom pulls ahead by an absurd margin.
The Hermes-focused assets you unlock include the Money Machine, the 10K Blueprint, the Quick Deploy Kit, the 30 Day Roadmap, the Swarm Playbook, the Agent OS revenue builds, the HermesClaw Payday Protocol, the 10K Autopilot, the $10K Fast Track, and the Hermes + Claude OS integration playbook.
You don't get that anywhere else.
Wider bonus stack
On top of the Hermes-specific stack, the wider Boardroom vault includes the AI Avatar launch kit, the Claude Profit Blueprint, the OpenClaw Agent Revenue Team Kit, the Save $36K OpenClaw Automations Stack, the AI Triple Threat Money Blueprint, the 105 Agency-Level Money-Making Prompts, the 8-Hour Agent Playbook, the Founders Revenue Blueprint, the Twitter AI System That Prints $1K/day, the Faceless AI YouTube Playbook, and a long list of other monetisation playbooks.
That's a stack that would cost you $10K+ if you bought each piece individually.
Founder access
Daily Q&A with me, personal responses, custom video tutorials for specific cases.
You won't get that level of access on a free Discord or a generic paid community.
Price
$59/mo locked forever.
That price doesn't go up for you, even if I raise it for new joiners later.
Risk policy
Twin guarantee.
7-day no-questions-asked refund.
Plus 30-day ROI guarantee.
Lowest-risk paid community in this niche.
Signal-to-noise ratio
High.
The $59/mo filter does its job — everyone inside is paying to be there, which means everyone is at least somewhat serious about shipping.
The conversations are about offers, builds, deployments, and outcomes — not benchmarks or drama.
Score: 9/10. Best Hermes community I've personally been in.
Why this Q&A is the fastest tour of the inside
If you want a 30-minute window into the Hermes content vibe inside the Boardroom, watch this Hermes Q&A.
The kind of breakdown you see in that video is the same kind of breakdown that plays out on the 5 weekly live calls.
You can also dig deeper into Hermes AI agent framework 2026, Hermes Agent OS, and Hermes agent community for the wider picture of what's inside.
The final scoring table
| Option | Live coaching | Hermes bonuses | Monetisation focus | Cost | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free Hermes Discords | None | None | None | Free | 3/10 |
| Reddit threads | None | None | None | Free | 4/10 |
| YouTube comments | None | None | None | Free | 2/10 |
| Generic paid AI community | 1-2/mo | None Hermes-specific | Generic | $99-299/mo | 5/10 |
| Niche Hermes Skool groups | Weekly max | Some | Light | Varies | 6/10 |
| One-off Hermes courses | None | Course only | Static | $497-2,000 | 4/10 |
| Free AI Money Lab (mine) | Limited | Starter | Light | Free | 6/10 |
| AI Profit Boardroom (mine) | 5/week | Full stack | Heavy | $59/mo locked | 9/10 |
The maths is pretty clear when you lay it out.
The "but you built it, of course you'd say that" objection
Fair, I'll address it directly.
Yes, I built the Boardroom.
Yes, I have an obvious bias.
But here's the thing.
I tested the alternatives because I genuinely wanted to know what was out there before doubling down on my own community.
If I'd found something better, I'd have either joined it instead or stolen the best ideas to integrate into the Boardroom.
I didn't find anything better.
That's not a flex — it's a description of the current market.
And the twin guarantee means you can verify the claim yourself with effectively zero financial risk.
You don't have to take my word.
You can join, test for 7 days, refund if it's not for you, no questions asked.
The Goldie Agency overlap
This is the second reason the Boardroom keeps winning.
It's not just a community — it's the gateway into a real 7-figure agency.
Goldie Agency runs Hermes-driven workflows for real clients at the high end.
Boardroom members get access to the same internal tooling, the same prompts, the same playbooks the team uses daily.
The mastermind side is also available for serious operators who want a higher-touch experience — you can book a free strategy session if you want to explore that side.
That overlap doesn't exist with any of the other communities I tested.
Most of them are run by content creators who haven't built an actual agency on top of the framework they're teaching.
The Boardroom is run by someone whose primary business runs on the same stack you're learning.
Who shouldn't join the best Hermes community
I want to be fair here.
Don't join if you're a passive learner who only wants to read and watch and never ship.
Don't join if you hate live calls and just want a doc to read.
Don't join if you can't commit at least an hour per week to implementation.
Don't join if you're already deep into a different stack and not interested in adding Hermes.
Don't join if you're hoping for a magic pill — there isn't one, you still have to do the work.
Everyone else — yes, this is the spot.
🆓 Want to test the Skool format free first? Free AI Money Lab is the free gateway. Free AI course, 1,000 free agents, a community. → Join free
What the first 30 days inside the Boardroom typically look like
Week one — orientation videos, Hermes Quick Deploy Kit installed, first agent running locally, joined a live call, posted your situation in the daily Q&A.
Week two — picked your monetisation path from the Hermes Money Machine, forked the closest workflow template from the 1,000+ vault, customised it for your niche.
Week three — workflow running end-to-end, debugging live on the weekly calls, applying Swarm Playbook patterns for the multi-agent steps.
Week four — first paid Hermes offer shipped or about to ship, $5K Proposal Pack used to draft your service description, first revenue (small or otherwise) on the way.
That's a typical 30 days.
Some members move slower.
Some move faster.
Either way, you're inside a structured system, not just a chat room.
Frequently asked questions about the best Hermes community
Is the AI Profit Boardroom genuinely the best Hermes community in 2026?
After testing free Discords, Reddit, YouTube comments, generic paid AI communities, niche Hermes Skool groups, one-off courses, and my own free community — yes, it's the one that scored highest across every criterion I care about.
How much does the best Hermes community cost?
$59/mo locked forever. Add the twin guarantee (7-day no-questions refund + 30-day ROI) and the effective downside risk is close to zero.
Is there a free Hermes community that's almost as good?
Free AI Money Lab is the closest free equivalent — same Skool format, lighter content, no 5 weekly live calls. Good on-ramp.
How does it compare to $99-299/mo paid AI communities?
The Boardroom is cheaper, more Hermes-specific, has more live coaching cadence, and has a bigger Hermes-focused bonus stack. The premium-priced generic communities tend to spread thin across many topics.
Will the price ever go up?
Possibly for new joiners. If you're locked in at $59/mo, your price stays at $59/mo for as long as your subscription stays active.
How do I know I'm not going to waste my $59?
The twin guarantee. 7-day no-questions-asked refund, plus 30-day ROI guarantee. You can test for a week, refund if it's not your thing, no interrogation.
What if I'm just starting out with AI?
The Quick Deploy Kit and 30 Day Roadmap are non-coder friendly. Plenty of members come in from marketing, agency, e-commerce, or coaching with no technical background.
🔥 Want to join the best Hermes community after testing the rest? Inside the AI Profit Boardroom, you get the full Hermes bonus stack, 5 weekly live coaching calls, daily Q&A with me, and 3,000+ members shipping real Hermes workflows. $59/mo locked, twin guarantee. → Get access here
About Julian
I'm Julian Goldie — AI entrepreneur, SEO expert, and founder of the AI Profit Boardroom (3,000+ members). I help business owners scale with AI agents, automation, and SEO.
- 282K+ YouTube subscribers
- 7-figure AI agency (Goldie Agency)
- Author of "SEO Link Building Mastery" and "Agency Marketing Mastery"
- 50,000+ Udemy students
- Daily training inside the Boardroom
→ Get my best Hermes training inside the AI Profit Boardroom
Also On Our Network
- 🌐 Read on bestaiagentcommunity.com
- 🌐 Read on aiprofitboardroom.com
- 🌐 Read on juliangoldieaiautomation.com
- 🌐 Read on aisuccesslabjuliangoldie.com
Related reading
- AI Profit Boardroom — the full review
- Hermes AI agent framework 2026
- Hermes Agent OS
- Hermes agent community
- AI Money Lab — the free gateway
- Best AI agent community 2026
- How to make money with Hermes agent
📺 Video notes + links to the tools 👉
🎥 Learn how I make these videos 👉
🆓 Get a FREE AI Course + Community + 1,000 AI Agents 👉
After testing every alternative I could find, the best Hermes community in 2026 is the AI Profit Boardroom — and I'd happily put my own $59 on the line to prove it.