| Self-host difficulty | ModerateFIRST-PARTY: manual install = Node 22 + pnpm + PostgreSQL + gateway config wizard, which our production preset automates end to end. Re-checked against a measured install on 2026-08-26 (harness run 20260826-195645): automated, the whole thing completes inside our 60s polling resolution on a 1 vCPU / 1 GB box. The rating stays "moderate" because it describes doing it by hand — the steps did not get simpler, they got scripted. |
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| Deploy | Native, Binarycurl install script / npm -g; confirm first-party deploy method |
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| Scaling | Single processPer-user agent; verify |
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| Config complexity | ModerateJSON5 config with several non-obvious gotchas found while building our install script: gateway.bind is an enum, not a raw host string; controlUi flags carry explicit security warnings; apiKey is a plain "${VAR}" string-interpolation reference (not a SecretRef object, as an earlier internal note wrongly assumed); overriding the built-in anthropic provider's baseUrl silently fails (upstream issue #56679), requiring a distinct custom provider instead |
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| Min vCPU (measured) | 1 vCPUFIRST-PARTY: measured on a DigitalOcean s-1vcpu-1gb (1 vCPU / 1 GB, Ubuntu 22.04), harness run 20260826-195645, 2026-08-26. Installed, verified and answered a live completion on a single vCPU; load average peaked at 1.82 during the completion, so one core is a real floor rather than a comfortable one. |
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| Min RAM (measured) | 1 GBFIRST-PARTY: measured on a DigitalOcean s-1vcpu-1gb (1 vCPU / 1 GB, Ubuntu 22.04), harness run 20260826-195645, 2026-08-26. Proven floor, not an estimate: every tier passed on a 1 GB box including a live model completion. Peak system use 664 MB of 961 MB usable, leaving 297 MB available — the tightest of the four agents measured. Below 1 GB is untested. |
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| Idle RAM (measured) | 278 MBFIRST-PARTY: measured on a DigitalOcean s-1vcpu-1gb (1 vCPU / 1 GB, Ubuntu 22.04), harness run 20260826-195645, 2026-08-26. Resident set of the openclaw-gateway process itself 30s after a completion, not whole-system use (the box totalled 630 MB with the OS and our agent). Peaked at 344 MB during the completion. Note this figure tracks the box: on a 4 GB tier the same build settled at 293 MB and peaked at 427 MB, because the Node heap sizes itself against available RAM. |
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| Infra cost | LowFIRST-PARTY: measured on a DigitalOcean s-1vcpu-1gb (1 vCPU / 1 GB, Ubuntu 22.04), harness run 20260826-195645, 2026-08-26. Runs on the cheapest tier we provision, but with the least headroom of the four CLI agents measured — a resident gateway process of ~278 MB plus a peak of 344 MB. Cheap to host, not free to host. |
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| One-click on AgentOcean | YesFIRST-PARTY: production install preset in src/lib/products.ts (id: openclaw) — provisions Docker + PostgreSQL + OpenClaw at checkout |
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