The True Cost of Building Your Own OpenClaw: The Full Bill, Itemized

"The software is free" is the most expensive sentence in computing, and OpenClaw is its current poster child. Free the way a puppy is free: the acquisition costs nothing, and then the acquisition needs a home, food, training, and a fence.

Here's the frame for everything below. Building your own always-on agent has five line items: the machine, the tooling, the configuration hours, the upkeep, and the meter. The alternative is $25 to $50 a month, flat, usage included. Every section ends with the bullseye: what that line item costs on myAgents, which is the point of this exercise.

Line item 1: the machine

An always-on agent needs a computer that never sleeps, and the sane advice is that it should be a dedicated one, not the laptop with your life on it. The community favorite is a small dedicated box (a Mac mini class machine runs $600 and up) or a rented VPS at $10 to $40 a month, which trades the hardware bill for the fun of administering a remote server. Add the quiet costs: it draws power around the clock, it occupies a shelf and a socket, and when it goes down at 2 a.m., it's down until you notice.

The bullseye: your agents run on our infrastructure. The machine line item is zero, there's nothing on your shelf, and uptime is a thing we lose sleep over so you don't.

Line item 2: the tooling

Between "downloaded" and "working" sits a toolchain: a terminal you're comfortable in, a runtime installed, config files edited, a gateway wired to your chat apps (each with its own tokens and approval hoops), and API accounts opened at the model providers, each with billing attached and keys to store somewhere safer than a sticky note. None of it is hard for a developer. All of it is a wall for everyone else, and every credential you mint is a thing that can leak.

The bullseye: setup is a conversation. You describe what's eating your week, agents get hired in about two minutes, and accounts connect with scoped OAuth clicks. You never open a terminal, mint an API key, or learn what a gateway is.

Line item 3: the configuration hours

This is the line item nobody budgets and everybody pays. The first evening gets it running. The following weeks get it running right: the personality tuned, the skills installed and vetted, the ninety-percent-working behavior edited, restarted, and retested toward a hundred. Value your time at anything and this becomes the biggest number on the page, and it front-loads exactly when your enthusiasm is highest and your payoff is lowest. Worse, the loop has a failure mode where the sit-down never happens and the half-working automation just sits there, collecting backlog.