OpenClaw hosting means paying a company to keep the free OpenClaw software running on a computer they own, so you do not have to keep one switched on in your office. OpenClaw itself sells no hosted version. At published prices on October 22, 2026, hosting runs from $4 a month for a bare rented machine to $90 a month for a large dedicated one, and the AI model is usually billed on top. What hosting does not buy you is anyone deciding what the agent should do, connecting it to your tools, or noticing when it quietly stops.
| Who hosts it | What you get | Published price, read October 22, 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Hostinger | OpenClaw or Hermes Agent set up on one plan, AI credits included | $4.99 a month on a 24-month term, $10.99 month to month, renews at $11.99 |
| xCloud | OpenClaw on a 6 GB rented machine, patched and backed up; AI account yours | $9.99 the first month, then $19.99 a month |
| AgentSME | OpenClaw run for you, AI included, with its own phone app | $14.99, $29.99 or $59.99 a month after a 7-day free trial |
| ClawBase | One hosted OpenClaw per agent; AI account yours | $19, $39 or $79 a month per agent |
| ClawHost | A dedicated rented machine, OpenClaw or Hermes Agent installed; AI account yours | $25, $40, $60 or $90 a month |
| A plain rented machine | A bare computer; you install and update OpenClaw yourself | DigitalOcean $4 or $6 a month; OVHcloud from $8.50 |
| Done for you | The agent designed, connected, hosted and kept working | OneAgentCo $1,500 plus $400 a month; VantaSoft from $1,000 plus $200 a month |
Every price above comes from that company's own page on the day we read it. Terms change, so check the page before you pay.
What does OpenClaw hosting actually mean?
OpenClaw hosting is a third-party service that runs the free OpenClaw software on a machine the hosting company keeps switched on, patched and backed up. OpenClaw's own site says it plainly: "No subscription. No hosted tier." So every "OpenClaw cloud" you can buy is someone else renting you a computer with OpenClaw on it.
That matters because the software was built to live on your machine. OpenClaw's product page lists Mac, Windows and Linux computers, and says your data "lives on your machine, not a vendor cloud." An agent that reads your email, updates your calendar and sends a morning summary has to be awake at 6 a.m. to do it, so the machine cannot be a laptop that goes to sleep.
The machine does not need to be big. OpenClaw's own hosting FAQ, read October 22, 2026, puts the absolute minimum at one processor core, 1 GB of memory and about 500 MB of disk, and recommends 2 GB or more once the agent handles several chat apps or opens web pages for you. That is why the cheapest rented machines on the table cost less than a sandwich. The expensive work happens at the AI company, which bills separately for every message the agent reads and writes.
A hosting company's job, then, is four things: supply the machine, install the software, keep both updated, and keep a backup. Some add a fifth, the AI model, so you have no separate bill. None of them do the sixth thing, which is to decide what the agent is for.
Who hosts OpenClaw for you, and what do they charge?
The hosts on the table charge between $4 and $90 a month at published prices read on October 22, 2026, and they differ on three points: whether the AI model is included, whether you pay per agent or per machine, and whether the machine is yours alone. What follows is what each company says about itself on its own page.
Hostinger sells one plan that covers OpenClaw, Hermes Agent, n8n or Paperclip, and lets you switch between them. Its page lists $4.99 a month on a 24-month term and $10.99 month to month, renewing at $11.99, with "pre-configured AI credits," Telegram pairing built in, and the option to run the agent on a ChatGPT Plus or Pro plan you already pay for. It carries a 30-day money-back guarantee. OpenClaw's own install documentation calls Hostinger's one-click plan the fastest path to a running copy, and also describes a cheaper route where Hostinger rents you a plain machine and you manage OpenClaw on it yourself.
xCloud runs OpenClaw on a 6 GB rented machine it provisions, patches and restores, at $9.99 for the first month and $19.99 a month after that, with five larger sizes above it. You bring your own account with an AI company; its page lists Anthropic, OpenAI, OpenRouter, Moonshot and Gemini. Telegram and WhatsApp work out of the box. Slack and Discord are listed as roadmap items, so ask before you buy if your team lives in Slack. Its cancellation terms charge for usage to date plus up to a 10% payment fee.
AgentSME is the one host on the table that includes the AI model in the price. Its plans are $14.99 a month for one agent, $29.99 for up to five agents with shared memory, and $59.99 for unlimited agents, each after a 7-day free trial with a card on file. It also gives you its own phone app instead of a chat-app bot, and connects to WhatsApp, Telegram and Discord.
ClawBase charges per agent: $19, $39 or $79 a month depending on the size of the machine behind it, with a 7-day money-back guarantee. You bring your own OpenAI or Anthropic account, and its page is candid that "most users spend $20-100/month on AI APIs," meaning the AI company's bill, on top. It connects to Telegram, WhatsApp, Slack, Discord and Signal.
ClawHost rents you a dedicated machine with OpenClaw or Hermes Agent already installed and gives you full control of it. Its plans are $25 a month for 2 processor cores and 4 GB of memory, then $40, $60 and $90 for larger machines, with a discount when billed yearly. You bring your own Anthropic account. A banner on its site, read the same day, says ClawHost has been acquired by GetOpenClaw.ai, which sells its own "OpenClaw Cloud" at $49 a month, so check which company you are actually buying from.
A plain rented machine is the cheapest route and the most work. DigitalOcean lists $4 a month for a 1 GB machine and $6 for 2 GB, which is OpenClaw's recommended size. OVHcloud sells OpenClaw-labeled plans from $8.50 a month. Hostinger's plain machines start at $6.49 a month on a 24-month term, renewing at $11.99. With all of these, someone on your team installs OpenClaw, installs every update, and is the person who gets called when it stops.
Done-for-you services sit at the bottom of the table because they are selling a different thing: the agent itself. OneAgentCo builds "AI employees" on OpenClaw for a $1,500 setup fee plus $400 a month each, which its page says covers dedicated hosting, uptime monitoring, daily backups, security patching and a monthly improvement cycle. We build custom agents on Hermes Agent rather than OpenClaw, from $1,000 for the build and $200 a month for hosting and maintenance. The difference between this row and the rest is what you are paying someone to own, and the next section makes that concrete.
What does a host take off your desk, and what stays yours?
A hosting company takes the machine, the installation, the updates and the backups. Everything that makes the agent useful to your business stays with you: the AI account, the connections to your email and calendar, the written instructions, the approval rules, and the weekly check that it is still doing the job. The table below puts the two side by side.
| The job | Your own computer | A plain rented machine | A managed OpenClaw host | Done for you |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Buy or rent the machine and keep it on | You | The host | The host | The service |
| Install OpenClaw | You | You | The host | The service |
| Install updates and security fixes every week | You | You | The host | The service |
| Keep a backup and restore it | You | You | Most hosts | The service |
| Pay the AI company | You | You | You, unless the plan includes it | Depends on the order |
| Write down what the agent should do, and how | You | You | You | The service, with you |
| Connect it to your email, calendar, files and CRM | You | You | You | The service, with your approval |
| Decide what it may do without asking | You | You | You | Agreed with you up front |
| Notice when a job quietly stops producing anything | You | You | You | The service |
Paying $20 a month moves the first four rows. The last five decide whether the agent earns its keep, and they stay where they are. If the person who was going to do those five rows is you, hosting bought you an afternoon of setup.
That is not a knock on the hosts. The ones on the table are honest about what they sell. xCloud describes itself as "OpenClaw as a service" rather than "rent a server and figure it out yourself," which is exactly the right description of rows one to four. The mistake is on the buyer's side: assuming that once the agent is hosted, it is handled.
Should you run OpenClaw on a computer you own instead?
Yes, if someone in your business will keep it awake, updated and locked down, and the agent is for one person. A machine you already own costs nothing extra per month, and OpenClaw's own FAQ says you do not need to buy anything special for it. For a team that wants the agent reachable from phones, a rented machine is usually the safer choice.
The Mac mini question comes up because the ClawBase pitch opens with "Skip the $600 Mac Mini," and OpenClaw's FAQ answers it directly: "Do I have to buy a Mac Mini to install this? No." It calls the Mac mini "a popular always-on host choice," and says a small rented machine, a home server or a Raspberry Pi-class box works too. Its laptop-versus-rented-machine answer is just as plain: if you want it working around the clock, rent a machine; if you want the least friction and you are fine with it pausing when the laptop sleeps or restarts, run it on the laptop.
The part owners underrate is what happens after the agent is reachable from outside the office. A computer in your office that only answers inside your own network is safe by default. The moment someone wants to message it from the airport, the usual shortcuts leave its control panel facing the open internet, and tens of thousands of OpenClaw setups were in exactly that state when we counted on October 19, 2026. How safe OpenClaw is to run in a business goes through the numbers and the eight questions to settle before the agent gets a real login. A managed host handles that exposure for you; a plain rented machine does not.
Who hosts Hermes Agent, and what does it cost?
Hermes Agent, the other free agent in this category, has the same hosting market plus one option OpenClaw lacks: its maker will host it. Nous Research's Hermes Cloud bills from a credit balance by the second while the agent runs, with $2 in credits needed to start one. We cover it, along with the rented-machine line, in what Hermes Agent costs a small business to run, so we will not repeat the arithmetic here.
Among third parties, three of the hosts above sell Hermes Agent alongside OpenClaw at the same prices. Hostinger's one plan covers either, and lets you delete one and start the other. xCloud lists managed Hermes Agent hosting at the same $9.99 then $19.99 a month. ClawHost installs either on its dedicated machines from $25 a month. If you have not yet picked between the two agents, what actually decides Hermes Agent against OpenClaw is the comparison to read first; hosting should not be the deciding factor, because the market for both is the same.
How we host the agents that run our own company
Every agent on our own team runs on Hermes Agent on a single Mac mini in our office, including the one that drafted this article. It stays on, it stays inside our own network, and its updates are installed by one named member of our team, never by the agent itself. For customers we do the opposite of sharing: every business we host gets a rented machine of its own in a data center, which nobody else's agents share, and we are the ones who patch it, back it up and watch it.
What both setups have taught us is that the machine is the cheap, boring part. The failures that cost us time were never the hosting. One agent reported success on a job whose work was gone. One change to how our agents connect to a system we use left six scheduled jobs doing nothing for about an hour, with no error anywhere. Those are rows six to nine on the table, and they are why our monthly fee covers maintenance rather than just a machine. What went wrong when we gave AI agents real work is the longer version.
When is hosting enough, and when is it not?
Hosting is enough when one technically comfortable person will own the agent, write its instructions, connect its tools and check its work, and all that person wanted to get rid of was the computer. Hosting is not enough when the reason you looked it up is that nobody on your team has time for the agent at all.
Three questions settle it. First, who will write down what the agent should do, in enough detail that a new hire could follow it? If the answer is nobody, no host fixes that. Second, who will approve each connection to your email, calendar and CRM, and decide what the agent may do on its own? If that is you, budget hours for it, because in our experience the connections take longer than the installation. Third, who will notice in week six that the morning summary stopped arriving? If that is also you, you have hired yourself as the agent's manager at a $20 a month discount.
If the answers to all three are a real person with real time, pick a managed host from the table, start with Telegram, and keep the agent's access to a short list. What access an AI agent should have to your business systems is the list to work from. If the answers are nobody, the honest options are the done-for-you row or no agent yet. If your real complaint is the software rather than the computer, choosing an OpenClaw alternative by why you are leaving is the better read. The four ways to get an AI agent for business puts hosting beside the other three, and what an AI agent actually costs prices the hours you would otherwise spend.
Frequently asked questions
Is there an official OpenClaw cloud?
No. OpenClaw's own site says "No subscription. No hosted tier," and the project is stewarded by an independent nonprofit. Every hosted OpenClaw you can buy is a third-party company running the free software for you, which is why prices and terms vary so much from one to the next.
How much does it cost to host OpenClaw?
Between $4 and $90 a month at published prices on October 22, 2026, before the AI model. A plain rented machine starts at $4 a month at DigitalOcean. Managed hosts start between $4.99 a month at Hostinger, on a 24-month term, and $25 at ClawHost, whose largest machine is $90. Most hosts leave the AI company's bill to you; ClawBase's page puts typical spend there at $20 to $100 a month.
Can I host OpenClaw for free?
The software is free, and a computer you already own costs nothing extra, so yes, if you are willing to keep that computer on and patched. The AI model is not free unless you run a small one on your own machine. Hosting companies charge from the first month, apart from AgentSME's 7-day trial and the money-back windows at ClawBase and Hostinger.
Do I need a Mac mini to run OpenClaw?
No. OpenClaw's FAQ says a Mac mini is a popular always-on choice, and a small rented machine, a home server or a Raspberry Pi-class box works too. The minimum it publishes is one processor core and 1 GB of memory, with 2 GB recommended.
Does the hosting company see my data?
Your agent's memory, files and chat history sit on the host's machine, so read each company's privacy terms before you connect your email. xCloud says each copy runs in a dedicated, isolated environment and that it never accesses your data except for support you ask for; ClawHost says its dedicated machines keep no logs and involve no third parties. Whatever the host promises, the agent still holds your logins, so give it only the access it needs.
Can I move from a host back to my own computer later?
Yes. OpenClaw's documentation covers backups and migration between machines, and ClawBase and ClawHost both say you can export your setup and leave. Expect to reconnect your chat apps and tools on the new machine.
Where to go from here
If what you want is the computer off your desk, pick a managed host from the table, check its current page, and keep the agent's access short. If what you want is the agent doing a real job in your business, with someone else owning the instructions, the connections and the weekly check, that is what we build. See how the Agent Service works and book a workflow discovery call to find out which job in your business an agent should take first.
