From Zero to 40 Clients: How We Built This on Oracle's Free Tier

Zero infrastructure budget. Forty dedicated AI agents. One Oracle Cloud free tier VM.

The Architecture

Each Hermes agent runs in a Docker container capped at 256MB RAM. When idle, containers use near-zero resources.

The Fleet Manager

We built a command-line fleet manager that monitors all 40 containers from one terminal. Starting or stopping a client takes one command.

Provisioning in 30 Seconds

When a client signs up, we select a pre-built container, inject their credentials and bot token, configure their persona, and start the gateway.

Auto-Recovery

If a container crashes, it restarts in under 2 seconds. Zero downtime in three months of production.

The Cost

Infrastructure costs: $0/month. That lets us charge $997 setup + $500/month per client.