Best OpenClaw Hosting (2026): Where to Put an Agent After KiloClaw Shut Down

In August 2026 the best-known managed OpenClaw host stopped selling. KiloClaw had already moved from $4 for a first month and $9 to renew, up to a flat $55 a month, and cut its free trial from seven days to one. Then the product page started returning a permanent redirect to the Kilo homepage, that homepage stopped mentioning KiloClaw at all, and a banner went up announcing that Kilo had been acquired by Anaconda.

If you were on it, you are not shopping for a better price. You are looking for somewhere to put an agent that was running fine yesterday.

This is a roundup of where to put it. Every price below was read on the provider's own page on 1 September 2026, and where we could not read one, the provider is named without a number rather than given a guess.

The short answer

• You want it running today and you will not touch a server. Ampere at $1 a month for the entry tier, which is enough to see whether you like the thing before you commit to $39.
• You want the cheapest credible managed option. OpenHosst at $2.99 a month flat, with the caveat about founding prices below.
• You already rent a VPS, or you would. A DigitalOcean droplet at $6 a month or a Contabo VPS at about €5.50 including VAT, with the self-hosting guide for the setup.
• Your agent touches systems you cannot hand to a third party. Self-host. Every provider below is the wrong answer for you.

How we picked

Six things, in the order they actually cost you money or sleep.

1. Price including renewal. Several hosts in this category advertise a first term and renew at double. The renewal figure is the price.
2. Trial length. The buyer's real risk is committing before the agent has run a full week of your actual work.
3. Isolation. Whether you get a dedicated VM or a shared container decides what a neighbour's compromise costs you.
4. BYOK and markup. Whether you can bring your own model keys, and what the host adds on top if you do not.
5. What happens to your data, including whether backups exist and whether you can get an export out.
6. Whether the vendor looks likely to be there in a year. This used to feel like a soft criterion. It is not.

Token spend is not on that list because it is not a hosting cost. Whatever you pay to host, the models are billed separately unless a plan explicitly bundles credits, and for most people the model bill is the larger of the two. Our cost breakdown has the maths.

The managed hosts

Ampere, from $1 a month

The naming is confusing and worth reading twice. The entry tier is called Free, and it bills at $1 a month. What is free is the hosting, which Ampere says is free during its beta on every tier, so the money is buying AI credits at a published rate of $1 to 1,000 credits.

That gives you 5,000 credits a month on 2 vCPU, 2 GB of RAM and 20 GB of storage. Pro is $39 a month for 20,000 credits on 4 vCPU and 8 GB. Ultra is $79 for 40,000 credits on 8 vCPU and 16 GB. Business is quoted on request. Pro and above take your own API keys at zero markup, which is the setting most people should be on once they know their usage.

The entry tier is the strongest argument here. A dollar is a low enough number to find out whether an always-on agent is something you actually use, which is the question most of this category asks you to answer after paying for a month.

Disclosure: we earn a commission if you sign up to Ampere through our link, at no extra cost to you.

OpenHosst, $2.99 a month

A flat $2.99 per app per month, with a seven-day trial that does not ask for payment details. It hosts a range of open-source apps rather than specialising in OpenClaw, which cuts both ways: broader operational experience, less agent-specific tuning.

Read the pricing page carefully before you commit. It describes $2.99 as a founding price and says plainly that it can increase. A founding rate is a promise about today, not about renewal.

OpenClawHosted.com, $9.99 a month

A single published price, positioned squarely at people who want the thing running without choices. There is little public detail on isolation or backups, which is the gap to close with support before you move an agent that matters.

DockClaw, from $19.99 a month

Starts at $19.99. The "from" is doing work, so price the tier you would actually need rather than the headline.

EasyClaw, $19 and $49 a month

Two plans, Starter at $19 and Pro at $49, billed through Stripe. Results come back through Telegram, and the split between plans is broadly reminders and follow-ups at the lower tier against unlimited runs, browser use and outbound webhooks at the upper. It is the most opinionated product in this list: less a server with OpenClaw on it, more a packaged assistant.

Named without prices

ZeroClaw Cloud, MyClaw, Agent37, StartClaw, Donely and LobsterTank all trade and all serve their pricing through client-side rendering that we could not read on the day. They may well be a good fit. We are not going to invent a number for them, and neither should you accept one from a comparison page that is not the vendor's own.

The one-click VPS route

If the appeal of managed hosting was never really the management, this is usually cheaper and always more portable.

Contabo is the outlier on raw specification: its entry Cloud VPS gives 4 vCPU where DigitalOcean's comparable price gives 1. If your agent runs a browser, that difference is felt.

Two adjacent options are worth knowing. Coolify is free to self-host and $5 a month for its cloud control plane connecting two servers, plus $3 for each additional one, which is a way to get a managed-feeling deploy on hardware you rent yourself. Elest.io manages open-source apps from $11 a month on a dedicated VM, with support tiers at $50 and $200 a month on top.

The renewal trap

This is the single most expensive thing to miss in this category.

Hostinger's OpenClaw plan is $5.99 a month against a list price of $21.99, a 73% discount, and it renews at $11.99 a month on a two-year term. That is still a fair price. It is also double what you agreed to, arriving twenty-four months later, and the headline number is the one that ends up in comparison tables.

Do the arithmetic on the renewal figure and the term length together. A two-year commitment at $11.99 is $287 of hosting before you have spent a cent on models.

Trial lengths, which nobody tabulates

The pattern in the second column matters more than any individual row. Trials in this category shortened through 2026, and KiloClaw's went from seven days to one shortly before it stopped selling. A trial that is too short to run a real week of work is not a trial, it is a demo.

Managed, VPS or self-host, with the actual maths

Take an agent doing daily work: a few hundred conversations, some browser automation, running around the clock.

• Managed, entry: $1 to $10 a month, plus models. You are paying for someone else to patch the box.
• VPS, one-click: $6 to $12 a month, plus models, plus your time. Budget an hour to set up and roughly an hour a month afterwards for updates and the occasional thing that breaks.
• Self-host on hardware you own: electricity, plus models. Free if the machine is already running.

At these numbers the price difference between managed and VPS is smaller than one hour of anyone's time, which means the decision is not really financial. It is about whether you want to be the person who gets paged when the gateway drops.

When every provider here is the wrong answer

Two cases, and they are common enough to state plainly.

Your agent needs credentials you cannot hand to a third party. An OpenClaw instance with access to your email, your calendar and a shell is a serious concession to make to a company you found through a comparison page. If the blast radius includes systems you would not give a contractor, self-host it and accept the maintenance. Our security write-up covers what to lock down.

You already run a home server. If there is a machine in your house that is on anyway, paying a host anything is worse than paying nothing.

There is a third case that used to be theoretical. If the provider disappears, what happens to your agent? KiloClaw's customers found out in August. Ask any host you are considering whether you can export your configuration and your agent's memory, and how, before you need it. A host that cannot answer that question quickly is telling you something.

FAQ

What is the cheapest way to host OpenClaw? A dollar a month on Ampere's entry tier, or $2.99 on OpenHosst, if hosting is all you are counting. If you own a machine that is already switched on, self-hosting is cheaper than all of them. None of these figures includes the model spend, which is usually the larger bill.

What happened to KiloClaw? It stopped being sold in August 2026. The product page permanently redirects to kilo.ai, which announces that Kilo has been acquired by Anaconda and no longer mentions the product. Documentation is still served, so existing instances may keep running, but there is nothing to sign up for. Kilo Code, the coding agent, is what the company sells now, and it is not a host.

Is managed hosting worth it over a $6 VPS? If you would otherwise spend an hour a month on updates and a bad evening when something breaks, yes. If you already keep servers patched, the managed premium buys you very little.

Can I bring my own API keys? On Ampere's Pro tier and above, at zero markup. On a VPS, always: it is your machine. Check before paying anywhere else, because a host that resells inference at a markup can quietly cost more than the hosting.

Which host is safest for an agent with access to my email? Whichever one you run yourself. If that is not practical, prefer a dedicated VM over a shared container, and ask about data export before you sign up rather than after.