alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Klaus – OpenClaw on a VM, batteries included
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!
Comments
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 --
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!
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? :)
Is this not just Claude Code? Genuinely hoping someone could spell it out for me
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?
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?
I get impression that this is automation tool for sales people. Does it do robotic phone calls to try to book meetings with customers?
"The week after our launch we spent 20+ hours fixing broken machines by hand."
oh fuck yea, sounds great.
Hard pass on this (and OpenClaw) thanks.
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.
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this is reallly fucking interesting
mind if I write an article about this on ijustvibecodedthis.com ?
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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.