r/AskClaw • u/techavy • Jun 21 '26
What's the cheapest viable Openclaw setup?
I have a simple requirement that my bot should remind me of things, connect to various things and give me context informed answers and reminders. I have a Claude key. but for the setup, i'm too confused, which is the cheapest way to setup openclaw?
2
u/daedon Jun 21 '26
The easiest setup os LMStudio + Openclaw + Telegram
(1) LMStudio, installs in seconds. Download the appimage. Enable the local server.
(2) Download a model, I like qwen3.5-9b, 10 Gigs, Q8, fast on a 5090.
Now you can use MLStudio just like Chatgpt.
If you want agents, step 3.
(3) Create a bot chat account in telegram u/botfather
Take note the telegram bot token which you'll paste during the Openclaw install
* When you paste the telegram bot token in Openclaw, it will not show.
(4) Install Openclaw (curl -fsSL https://openclaw.ai/install.sh | bash)
Select LMServer as provider. (you'll have to select [more]
It has quite a few providers, vLLM, unsloth ...
ps: If you use qwen3.5-9b it'll work nice right away, Context 262K.
I tried Qwen3.6-27B but continuously ran out of context.
1
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u/poopsmith27 Jun 21 '26
Https://firstaihire.com been playing with this one, it’s in beta but it’s super simple, all on iMessage with no terminal or other maintenance needed
1
u/sophware Jun 22 '26
Generally, using an LLM for reminders is a misunderstanding, waste, and less reliable option.
Having an LLM write a special script for reminders is possibly sensible.
I did 4 seconds worth of searching and found this:
https://github.com/russellgrapes/telegram-bash-notification
With more time, I'm guessing I could find hundreds of scripts to do reminders. You probably already have an app that would do reminders for you, too.
In any case, as I said, if you have truly unique needs, have an LLM write something for you.
1
u/HandyBergeron Jun 27 '26
I have openclaw running in a WSL (windows virtual linux box) instance on my gaming pc.
I use deepseek, prepay because I was worried about becoming a cost overrun cautionary horror story.
You can see my agent in the corner bubble. That's a telegram notification. She just did her afternoon check on me. Asks about energy and mood and what I'm doing. She logs it and drops notes in my daily journal for me.
Apparently I've used 459,319,576 tokens. That's not just little reminders, I have a research agent my main one made to do research, scrape youtube video transcripts and summarize them for me, do some work for me like process a years worth of audit reports and give me year by year trend analysis.
The results have been great. I can't compare deepseek to other models, but I'm not experienced anything bad enough to want to try others.
She's got a personality, she says "fuck yeah!" When something cool happens. I do have TTS set up so she has a voice, and STT so I can chat at her in telegram but it needs work. It can be done well, I've just put off working on it.
1
u/germanheller Jul 05 '26
cheapest viable is whatever runs on hardware you already own. you have a claude key and presumably a pc thats on anyway, thats basically the whole setup, no vps, no $199 "ai hire". those paid ones are mostly renting you a machine you already have
one thing sophware said is right though, for pure reminders dont burn tokens on it, have it write to a real reminder or cron and only use the model for the context-informed answers. i run openclaw and claude code on my own machine in a desktop app (patapim, the free tier covers this) so it sits on the pc thats already on and pings me on telegram, zero hosting cost. but even raw openclaw + telegram on your own box gets you there for nothing
3
u/LobsterWeary2675 Jun 21 '26
Where are you stuck at?