An always-on AI agent that lives on a cheap little Raspberry Pi in your home, with a real phone number you text over iMessage or SMS from anywhere. It runs Hermes, an open-source agent, and installs by handing the guide to a coding agent that works over SSH. Best of all, it's a foundation: build a family calendar on a kitchen screen, a recipe helper on the fridge, whatever you dream up. We build in public — join the Discord to see what others are making.
Hey Product Hunt 👋
I always thought a personal AI agent was cool, but I could never figure out where one should actually live. On my laptop it's off when I travel, and reaching it means some clunky bot app I never open.
So I gave my house its own computer. iMessage Hermes is an always-on AI agent running on a cheap little Raspberry Pi, with a real phone number I text over iMessage or SMS from anywhere. It runs Hermes (open-source), and you set it up by handing the guide to a coding agent — it does most of the work over SSH.
The best part: it's a foundation. Once it's running, you build whatever you want on it. My family has a dashboard on a screen in the kitchen with everyone's upcoming commitments — games, appointments, who's traveling — and I just text the agent to add things ("dinner with the Kims Friday at 7") or ask it "when's the recital?" There's a recipe helper on a screen stuck to the fridge, so the steps stay right in front of you while your hands are covered in flour. We've already got a community building things like this, and we're launching a Discord so creators can share what they make.
Would love your feedback, and happy to answer anything. What would you put on your always-on home agent?
the "provision a thread, not a raw number" answer to Omri's question above is a much better design than I expected, most projects like this just ship an open phone number and hope for the best. separate question - what happens to the agent's state after a power blip? Pis and SD cards are notorious for corrupting on a hard power cut, and this thing is meant to be always-on with nobody babysitting it. is there anything like a read-only root fs or periodic snapshot, or is "just don't lose power" the honest answer for now
Love the "build it with an AI over SSH" approach, that's a really clever onboarding trick. One thing I'd want before committing a Pi to this full time is proper scheduled task support with local fallback if the network drops, so things like the kitchen calendar or recipe helper keep working even when the internet flakes out.
kitchen dashboard and fridge recipe helper are exactly the kind of small home automation that never gets built because setting up a server is annoying, so having it fall out of one Pi is a nice unlock. question on the phone number side though - since the agent has its own number, is there any allowlist on who it'll actually act on, or does anyone who texts that number get to add to the family calendar / whatever gets built on top. wrong number texting in feels like the actual attack surface here, more than the iMessage bridge itself
This is cool. I have a Pi and I’m going to try setting this up — I’ll come back and say if it worked or not. Congrats on the launch. More tutorials like this would be great.
The interesting constraint here is that iMessage doesn't really want to run anywhere except macOS. So a Pi in the corner of your house implies something else is doing the actual sending — a Mac acting as a bridge, or one of the reverse-engineered routes.
Which path did you take, and how stable has it been across iOS updates? That's the part I'd want to understand before hanging an always-on agent off it, since the failure mode isn't a crash you'd notice — it's messages quietly not going out while you assume they did.
About iMessage Hermes on a Raspberry Pi on Product Hunt
“An always-on AI agent that lives in your home”
iMessage Hermes on a Raspberry Pi launched on Product Hunt on July 27th, 2026 and earned 95 upvotes and 10 comments, placing #19 on the daily leaderboard. An always-on AI agent that lives on a cheap little Raspberry Pi in your home, with a real phone number you text over iMessage or SMS from anywhere. It runs Hermes, an open-source agent, and installs by handing the guide to a coding agent that works over SSH. Best of all, it's a foundation: build a family calendar on a kitchen screen, a recipe helper on the fridge, whatever you dream up. We build in public — join the Discord to see what others are making.
iMessage Hermes on a Raspberry Pi was featured in Open Source (68.6k followers), Artificial Intelligence (474.6k followers), GitHub (41.3k followers) and Bots (110.8k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 153.2k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted iMessage Hermes on a Raspberry Pi?
iMessage Hermes on a Raspberry Pi was hunted by Patrick Lucas. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
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Patrick Lucas