My Tech/AI Stack

Cloud Setup

Microsoft Azure+365 (~$300/month) Most importantly this has a small but fairly compelte E5 Buildout which accounts for roughly $150 A few honeypots, and a few small VMs and ocational testing accounts for another $100 with the rest being taken up by using Azure Backup and Storage. I used to have a more complete buildout but since 2020 the monthly costs skyrocketed to around $2800 and I went on a month long crusade to shut down everything that wasn’t immediatly necessary.

Google Cloud (~5/month) I mostly manage with free tier with most of the cost comming from some API usage and some recent Gemini testing. I have a love/hate relationship with google with my account being blocked multiple times for various transgrations (real or otherwise).

Oracle Cloud (~15/month) Oracle is very generous with free tier VMs and the $15 really comes from a long running honeypot and a couple of side-projects. Oracle offers really great speeds when used as a Jump server to Azure or vice versa. Excelent as a proxy chain since they don’t block access to shadier solutions as much as Azure and Google.

Other (~400/month) There are a couple of bulletproof VMs and I have about 5 VMs running through residential proxies and 2 long running servers on the onion network. The residential proxies are increasing in price rapidly but are a necessity.

VPN Setup

I use both Tailscale and Cloudfront. Tailscale for the personal AI network and Cloudfront for any other tunneling needs.

AI Setup

Since 2025 I have integrated AI heavily into my workflow including deploying 24/7 running agents to help monitor the meriad of signals I recieve throughout the day. I have recently expanded into having Agents manage ongoing scans such as those monitoring the external threat leandscape.

Subscriptions

OpenAI ChatGPT Pro Max ($200/month)

I use Codex both in desktop and CLI form and this is my primary llm interface.

Claude Pro ($20/month) Google AI Plus ($4.99/month) I need to be able to test skills and plugins across the frontier models.

Microsoft CoPilot 365 (Not sure, paid by varius customers)

OpenAI API Costs (~15$/month) Used for Image Generationa and certain specialized projects where I need to monitor costs.

Microsoft AI Foundry (~10$/month) Various projects within azure mostly still using OpenAI. Used for testing Purview and Sentinel integration.

Misc. (~$100/month) Agentmail.to, Tailscale, Firecrawl, bunch of other nickle and dime APIs..

Hermes Agent

Lenovo ThinCenter Mini PC Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700T CPU, 32.0 GB RAM Isolated on its own sub-net configured to communicate with me via E-Mail, Telegram and Microsof Teams. Uses Tailscale to create tunels used for web hooks.

Responsible for managing various e-mail accounts for important notifications, performing scheduled pre-configured scans and assist with my schedule. There is a separate profile responsible for creating reports and client presentations and there are typicaly 4-5 agents running at the same time.

This system runs Windows 11 Pro + WSL. This is dumb but because of some unfortunate circumstances I require this system to be be able to run some workflows that require windows.

Virtual Jimmy

Virtual Jimmy (currently in his 6th iteration) is an AI Assistant built on top of Hermes Agent customied to support a SOC or GRC team. The context is tailored around Risk Management, Privacy and Compliance processes and uses a set of skill customized to policy lookup and validation.

This codebase is about 50% Hermes Agent 50% custom code centered around the email gateway and the addition of RBAC and a comprehensive user folder management backend to store documents produced by the agent.

This agent has a Word, Excel and expecialy PowerPoint generation capability that currently destroys the competition.

This agent also has a custom orgonization CLI that gives the agent access to user, project, and task data.

Raspberi PI 5 8GB Ram, 128GB MicroSD Drive Azure VM 2 CPU 8GB Ram, 30 GB SSD Drive

Initialy tested running on the PI I ran into a hard wall due to HDD speed and slow CPU. The PI also ran alarmingly hot. I migrated the entire setup to azure with an average cost of around 73$/month for the VM.

So far a team of about 10 with 4-5 regular users doesn’t seem to overload it at all.

Agent Identity

This is evolving. Right now each agent is assigned their own e-mail address via agentmail.to which is uses a whitelist along with the hermes gateway restrictions. I am testing Entra Agent Identity right now with some positive results but also some very real roadblocks.

Using a hook to enforce prompted guardrails has been working, but I am not confident it can scale beyond a small team.