openclaw
Your own personal AI assistant. Any OS. Any Platform. The lobster way. 🦞
The Lens
OpenClaw is a self-hosted AI assistant that connects to every chat platform you already use. WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord, Signal, iMessage, Teams, Matrix, and about 15 more. One local gateway, one brain, every inbox.
The setup is real work but the payoff is real too. You run a Node.js daemon on your machine (or a small VPS with Tailscale for always-on). Each messaging channel has its own auth dance: WhatsApp needs phone pairing, Telegram needs a bot token, Slack needs an app. Once wired up, you get voice wake words, browser automation, cron jobs, webhooks, and a skills platform that keeps growing.
Solo users: run it on your laptop and bring your own API keys. Power users: put it on a $5 VPS and you have a private AI butler across every platform. There is no paid tier, no cloud service, no data leaving your machine.
The catch: "free" still costs money. You need LLM API keys (OpenAI, Anthropic, or local models), and the WhatsApp integration uses an unofficial library that Meta could break tomorrow.
Free vs Self-Hosted vs Paid
fully freeFree Tier
Completely free and open source under MIT. No paid tier exists.
Self-Hosted
Run a Node.js gateway locally or on a VPS. Bring your own LLM API keys. Each messaging channel requires separate configuration.
Paid
None for the tool. LLM API costs depend on your provider and usage.
The tool is free. You pay your LLM provider for API calls.
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License: MIT License
Use freely, including commercial. Just keep the license.
Commercial use: ✓ Yes
About
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- openclaw (Organization)
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Featured in The Open Source Drop #8