Show HN: Klaus – OpenClaw on a VM, batteries included

[robthompson2018]

We are Bailey and Robbie and we are working on Klaus (https://klausai.com/): hosted OpenClaw that is secure and powerful out of the box.

Running OpenClaw requires setting up a cloud VM or local container (a pain) or giving OpenClaw root access to your machine (insecure). Many basic integrations (eg Slack, Google Workspace) require you to create your own OAuth app.

We make running OpenClaw simple by giving each user their own EC2 instance, preconfigured with keys for OpenRouter, AgentMail, and Orthogonal. And we have OAuth apps to make it easy to integrate with Slack and Google Workspace.

We are both HN readers (Bailey has been on here for ~10 years) and we know OpenClaw has serious security concerns. We do a lot to make our users’ instances more secure: we run on a private subnet, automatically update the OpenClaw version our users run, and because you’re on our VM by default the only keys you leak if you get hacked belong to us. Connecting your email is still a risk. The best defense I know of is Opus 4.6 for resilience to prompt injection. If you have a better solution, we’d love to hear it!

We learned a lot about infrastructure management in the past month. Kimi K2.5 and Mimimax M2.5 are extremely good at hallucinating new ways to break openclaw.json and otherwise wreaking havoc on an EC2 instance. The week after our launch we spent 20+ hours fixing broken machines by hand.

We wrote a ton of best practices on using OpenClaw on AWS Linux into our users’ AGENTS.md, got really good at un-bricking EC2 machines over SSM, added a command-and-control server to every instance to facilitate hotfixes and migrations, and set up a Klaus instance to answer FAQs on discord.

In addition to all of this, we built ClawBert, our AI SRE for hotfixing OpenClaw instances automatically: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v65F6VBXqKY. Clawbert is a Claude Code instance that runs whenever a health check fails or the user triggers it in the UI. It can read that user’s entries in our database and execute commands on the user’s instance. We expose a log of Clawbert’s runs to the user.

We know that setting up OpenClaw is easy for most HN readers, but I promise it is not for most people. Klaus has a long way to go, but it’s still very rewarding to see people who’ve never used Claude Code get their first taste of AI agents.

We charge $19/m for a t4g.small, $49/m for a t4g.medium, and $200/m for a t4g.xlarge and priority support. You get $15 in tokens and $20 in Orthogonal credits one-time.

We want to know what you are building on OpenClaw so we can make sure we support it. We are already working with companies like Orthogonal and Openrouter that are building things to make agents more useful, and we’re sure there are more tools out there we don’t know about. If you’ve built something agents want, please let us know. Comments welcome!

[ndnichols]

This sounds awesome and exactly like the easy and safe on-ramp to OpenClaw that I've been looking for! I want to believe.

Two questions as a potential user who knows the gist of OpenClaw but has been afraid to try it: 1. I don't understand how the two consumption credits play into the total cost of ownership. E.g. how long will $20 of Orthogonal credits last me? I have no idea what it will actually cost to use Klaus/OpenClaw for a month. 2. Batteries included sounds great, but what are those batteries? I've never heard of Apollo or Hunter.io so I don't know the value of them being included.

In general, a lot of your copy sounds like it's written for people already deep into OpenClaw. Since you're not targeting those folks, I would steer more towards e.g. articulating use cases that work ootb and a TCO estimate for less technical folks. Good luck, and I'm eager to try it!

[TheDong]

The cost of ownership for an OpenClaw, and how many credits you'll use, is really hard to estimate since it depends so wildly on what you do.

I can give you an openclaw instruction that will burn over $20k worth of credits in a matter of hours.

You could also not talk to your claw at all for the entire month, setup no crons / reoccurring activities / webhooks / etc, and get a bill of under $1 for token usage.

My usage of OpenClaw ends up costing on the order of $200/mo in tokens with the claude code max plan (which you're technically not allowed to use with OpenClaw anymore), or over $2000 if I were using API credits I think (which Klause is I believe, based on their FAQ mentioning OpenRouter).

So yeah, what I consider fairly light and normal usage of OpenClaw can quite easily hit $2000/mo, but it's also very possible to hit only $5/mo.

Most of my tokens are eaten up by having it write small pieces of code, and doing a good amount of web browser orchestration. I've had 2 sentence prompts that result in it spinning up subagents to browse and summarize thousands of webpages, which really eats a lot of tokens.

I've also given my OpenClaw access to its own AWS account, and it's capable of spinning up lambdas, ec2 instances, writing to s3, etc, and so it also right now has an AWS bill of around $100/mo (which I only expect to go up).

I haven't given it access to my credit card directly yet, so it hasn't managed to buy gift cards for any of the friendly nigerian princes that email it to chat, but I assume that's only a matter of time.

[xienze]

> safe on-ramp to OpenClaw

IMO I don't think the "OpenClaw has root access to your machine" angle is the thing you should worry that much about. You can put your OpenClaw on a VM, behind a firewall and three VPNs but if it's got your Google, AWS, GitHub, etc. credentials you've still got a lot to worry about. And honestly, I think malicious actors are much more interested in those credentials than wiping out your machine.

I'm honestly kind of surprised everyone neglects to think about that aspect and is instead more concerned with "what if it can delete my files."

[somewhatrandom9]

You may want to also look into AWS's OpenClaw offering (I was surprised to see this): https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-openclaw-on-ama...

[robthompson2018]

Our average user spends $50 a month all-in (tokens and subscription). If you're budget conscious you can use a cheap model (eg Gemini Flash) or even a free one. I confess I am a snob and only use Claude Opus, but even using OpenClaw all day every day I only spend about $500 a month on tokens.

Orthogonal credits are used more frequently by power users. For everyday tasks they'll last a very long time, I don't think any of our users have run out.

Some example Orthogonal user cases:

* customers in sales uses Apollo to get contact info for leads

* I use Exa search to help me prepare for calls by getting background info on customers and businesses

* I used SearchAPI to help find AirBnbs.

Point taken on the copy! We made this writing more technical for the HackerNews audience and try to use less jargon on other platforms.

[nullcathedral]

Do you run a dedicated "AI SRE" instance for each customer or how do you ensure there is no potential for cross-contamination or data leakage across customers?

Basically how do you make sure your "AI SRE" does not deviate from it's task and cause mayhem in the VM, or worse. Exfiltrates secrets, or other nasty things? :)

[baileywickham]

We run a dedicated AI SRE for each instance with scoped creds for just their instance. OpenClaw by nature has security risks so we want to limit those as much as possible. We only provision integrations the user has explicitly configured.

[Tharre]

I don't get it. The point of OpenClaw is it's supposed to be an assistant, helping you with whatever random tasks you happen to have, in natural language. But for that to work, it has to have access to your personal data, your calendar, your emails, your credit card, etc., no?

Are there other tasks that people commonly want to run, that don't require this, that I'm not aware of? If so I'd love to hear about them.

The ClawBert thing makes a lot more sense to me, but implementing this with just a Claude Code instance again seems like a really easy way to get pwned. Without a human in the loop and heavy sandboxing, a agent can just get prompt injected by some user-controlled log or database entry and leak your entire database and whatever else it has access to.

[jascha_eng]

Yes and even now if you tell the LLM any private information inside the sandbox it can now leak that if it gets misdirected/prompt injected.

So there isn't really a way to avoid this trade-off you can either have a useless agent with no info and no access. Or a useful agent that then is incredibly risky to use as it might go rogue any moment.

Sure you can slightly choose where on the scale you want to be but any usefulness inherently means it's also risky if you run LLMs async without supervision.

The only absolutely safe way to give access and info to an agent is with manual approvals for anything it does. Which gives you review fatigue in minutes.

[robthompson2018]

I don't follow your argument about getting pwned.

A user could leave malicious instructions in their instance, but Clawbert only has access to that user's info in the database, so you only pwned yourself.

A user could leave malicious instructions in someone else's instance and then rely on Clawbert to execute them. But Clawbert seems like a worse attack vector than just getting OpenClaw itself to execute the malicious instructions. OpenClaw already has root access.

Re other use cases that don't rely on personal data: we have users doing research and sending reports from an AgentMail account to the personal account, maintaining sandboxing. Another user set up this diving conditions website, which requires no personal data: https://www.diveprosd.com/

[lifis]

You can solve that by requiring confirmation for anything except reading information from trusted sites. Web visits can be done without confirmation by reading a cached copy and not executing any JavaScript on it with network access (otherwise visiting arbitrary sites can leak information via the URLs sent to arbitrary servers)

[sam_chenard]

on the prompt injection via email problem — model choice helps but it's not the right layer to defend. you want to scan at ingestion, before the content ever hits context.

we built LobsterMail (lobstermail.ai) specifically for this. we're an email security team behind (palisade.email) and have been really obsessed with this problem for the last 6 months.

every inbound email gets scanned for 6 injection categories (boundary manipulation, role hijacking, data exfiltration attempts, obfuscated payloads, etc.) before it reaches the agent. the SDK exposes `email.isInjectionRisk` and `safeBodyForLLM()` which wraps untrusted content in boundary markers with a metadata header. the agent can make an informed decision rather than blindly consuming whatever lands in its inbox.

it's also agent-native — the agent self-provisions its own `@lobstermail.ai` address, no oauth app needed, no borrowing the user's gmail. big respect for agentmail too but give a shot to lobstermail if youre interested!

[ericlevine]

> Connecting your email is still a risk.

> If you’ve built something agents want, please let us know. Comments welcome!

I'll bite! I've built a self-hosted open source tool that's intended to solve this problem specifically. It allows you to approve an agent purpose rather than specific scopes. An LLM then makes sure that all requests fit that purpose, and only inject the credentials if they're in line with the approved purpose. I (and my early users) have found substantially reduces the likelihood of agent drift or injection attacks.

https://github.com/clawvisor/clawvisor

[robthompson2018]

Would love to see any evals you've run of this system

[pixeyo]

The actual cost depends almost entirely on context window size and task frequency, not the hosting tier.

  Light usage (a few conversations a day, no cron jobs) typically lands $5-20/month in API tokens. The trap is scheduled tasks or       
  heartbeat loops running against Opus — that compound fast. Switching the default model to Sonnet cuts costs ~5x for most workloads with
  no real quality difference for non-coding tasks.

  A few things that actually move the needle:
  - Run openclaw models list to see what's configured, then set a cheaper default for routine tasks
  - Set a token budget in any cron job skill config before running it overnight
  - Keep MEMORY.md trimmed — long memory files add to every request

  I put together a cost calculator at openclawcheatsheet.com that lets you model different usage patterns (message frequency, cron jobs,
  context size) and get a realistic monthly estimate. Helped me stop being surprised by my Anthropic bill.

[sealthedeal]

Is this not just Claude Code? Genuinely hoping someone could spell it out for me

[baileywickham]

Claude Code is awesome, I use it all day, every day. OpenClaw is similar but not the same. I think if all you do is write code, CC is probably best for you.

OpenClaw is interesting because it does a lot of things ok, but it was the first to do so. It will chat with you in Telegram/messages which is small but surprisingly interesting. It handles scheduled tasks. The open source community is huge, clawhub is very useful for out of the box skills. It's self building and self modifying.

[gavinray]

We're all asking the same thing. It's basically Claude Code, AFAICT

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47327474

[throwatdem12311]

Claude Desktop app had scheduled tasks now for both Code and Cowork. For what I would use OpenClaw for it’s basically obsolete now.

[jdeng]

For openclaw to become helpful, you have to connect it to your personal email, access to your file etc. All of these requires user's manual setup right?. I do not get the point of "batteries included". Installing it is not the bottleneck right? The official docs has detail procedures for all deployment options.

[Lalabadie]

Right, whether it runs in a sandbox is the least of my concerns if the point is to give that sandbox a way to spend or communicate in my name.

[scosman]

What's the best "docker with openclaw" currently available? I have my own computers to run it on (I don't need a server). I want to play around, but containerized to avoid the security risk of MacOS app.

There seem to be about 20 options, and new ones every day. Any consensus on the best few are, and their tradeoffs?

[raizer88]

I am still searching for a compose up -d to this day, but without success. And the other poster want me to create a k8s cluster for a bot?!?!

[clawguy]

I'm working on KubeClaw: https://kubeclaw.ai - a bit more sophisticated then all the open source cloud native implementations I found in my research.

[scosman]

update: I did a standard openclaw install in docker and it works great.

Their docs are confusing. It read like the gateway is in docker, and you'll need a connected computer. However the gateway can run agents/web_search/etc. The tools you'd expect to work in a CLI environment. Even headless browsers.

Docs: https://docs.openclaw.ai/install/docker

[briandoll]

The biggest value IMHO of OpenClaw is that it's in the Apple ecosystem, so it leverages Reminders, iCloud sync for Obsidian values, etc., so not having a Mac option is pretty limiting for anyone who's relying on those integrations currently.

[Frannky]

I found ZeroClaw plus Hetzner to be a good option. I've been using it for a week, and it's stable and robust.

Complex abilities unlocked calling a FastAPI server with one skill for each endpoint

[WA]

FastAPI server on the same Hetzner box? The endpoints are written by ZeroClaw?

[gostsamo]

For a product that supposedly handles the most private bits of one's personal life, I would've expected much stronger wording in the privacy section. Instead, privacy and security are meshed up in one soup, there is no mention of internal access controls, and no promise that this info won't be shared under no shape or form or derivative beyond providing the functions necessary for the service. CCPA is mentioned but only for California residents. Generally, use at your own risk.

[simple10]

Klaus looks great! It's definitely looks like a step up from the one-click VPS deploys that are terribly insecure.

I spent the past month hacking on openclaw to play nice in a docker container for my own VPS use.

This project has a lot of useful debugging tools for running multiple claws on a single VPS:

https://github.com/simple10/openclaw-stack

For average users, Klaus is a much better fit.

[orsorna]

Does the claw in the VM have proven capability (verified by your team) to track changes it makes to itself and persist across reboots? What about rollback capability?

[baileywickham]

We allow you to backup to a private Github repo you own so if you want to version control your setup that way you can. Otherwise most changes are tracked in the chat history and the LLM has some ability to repair itself or validate changes before they are made.

[jimmySixDOF]

Nice turn key solution I like that it comes with it's own email and you don't need to add anything .... I was a fan of this VPS setup service for a beads agent system up from end to end but you need to BYO everything still it's free as in open source so got to thank Sir Dicklesworthstone for putting it together --

https://agent-flywheel.com/

[hasa]

I get impression that this is automation tool for sales people. Does it do robotic phone calls to try to book meetings with customers?

[robthompson2018]

We certainly have customers who work in sales, but that's not the only use case.

OpenClaw is capable of using ElevenLabs or other providers to make phone calls, but I personally haven't done this and as far as I know none of our customers have either. Is AI good enough at cold calling yet for this to work? I personally would never entertain such a call.

[rcarmo]

Hmm. OK, I guess. But I are you going to stick to just OpenClaw, or look into variants? (I created https://github.com/rcarmo/piclaw, which is a leaner, less hype-driven and more utilitarian thing)

[skybrian]

Not a fan of OpenClaw but if you're going to do that, why not on a service that gives you multiple VM's? https://exe.dev/docs/use-case-openclaw

[brtkwr]

I imagine this would be quite a good fit for people who don't want to manage their own OpenClaw instance on their home network which is near zero cost especially if you use it with Gemini free tier + a low power arm board.

[nonameiguess]

Acknowledging the reality of history and business here that there's a 99% chance you don't exist in a few years, I would encourage you nonetheless to break EC2 and AWS in every single way you can possibly imagine and in ways you can't, obviously not in your customer account, but in a separate one. I was doing consulting services for a machine learning company that sold pre-configured EC2s and associated data infra to third-party researchers at a markup and basically stood up and ran their whole environment for about two years. Networking is probably the most frustrating thing you'll ever encounter and beware when they change their APIs and parameters that used to default to null no longer do. It's especially fun when the Linux kernel on the hypervisors you can't see messes with your packets.