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

klausai.com

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

#41

Post by necrodome »

xienze wrote: post #31
ndnichols wrote: post #5

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/…

> 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 mac…

Because no one has a reliable solution to that problem. The file deletion angle is easier to advertise. "runs in a sandbox, can't touch your system" fits on a landing page, even if it's not the more important problem.

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

#42

Post by baileywickham »

xienze wrote: post #31
ndnichols wrote: post #5

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/…

> 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 mac…

I think I agree here but for us it's more of a defense in depth thing. If you want to give it access to your email you are opening yourself up to attacks, but it doesn't have that access by default. We have an integration to give the agent it's own inbox instead of requiring access to your gmail for this reason. Similarly, if you want to only use Klaus for coding there is no risk to your personal data, even if your Klaus instance is hacked.

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

#44

Post by kennywinker »

jimbob45 wrote: post #32
TheDong wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 usag…

Would having a locally-hosted model offset any of these costs?

Yes, but that comes at the cost of using a dumber llm. The state of the art ones are only available via commercial api, and the best self-hostable models require $10,000+ gpus.

This is a problem for coding as smarter really has an impact there, but there are so so so many tasks that an 8b model that runs on a $200 gpu can handle nicely. Scrape this page and dump json? Yeah that’s gonna be fine.

This is my conclusion based on a week or so of using ollama + qwen3.5:3b self hosted on a ~10 year old dell optiplex with only the built-in gpu. You don’t need state of the art to do simple tasks.

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

#45

Post by throwaway314155 »

baileywickham wrote: post #33
sealthedeal wrote: post #20

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

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 usefu…

It all runs on commands like imsg that Claude would be excellent at running given a suitable CLAUDE.md. Scheduled tasks are literally just cron, no problem for Claude.

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

#46

Post by _joel »

robthompson2018 wrote: post #10
ndnichols wrote: post #5

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/…

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 an…

Your average user spends £50 a month? How long have you been running, just wondering since OpenClaw was only released (as openclaw) a month ago.

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

#47

Post by jascha_eng »

Tharre wrote: post #37

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…

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.

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

#48

Post by wiether »

haolez wrote: post #16
grim_io wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolute madman :) Giving an agent access to AWS is effectively giving it your credit card. At the max, I would give it ssh access to a Hetzner VM with its own user, capable of running rootles podman containers.

Not at all. AWS IAM policy is a complex maze, but incredibly powerful. It solves this exact problem very well.

Do you honestly believe that they made the effort of setting the appropriate roles and policies, though?

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

#50

Post by 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/

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