10 Companies Launched OpenClaw Hosting This Week. Here's What Nobody's Talking About.
I run a managed OpenClaw hosting service. So do 10 other people now. An honest look at who's building what, who's going to survive, and what users actually need.
OpenClaw hit 185K GitHub stars in 60 days. For context: React took 8 years to reach 100K. Linux took 12.
Then Y Combinator tweeted this: "OpenClaw is so hard to set up that even most engineers give up." That got 2,800 likes and 370 replies — mostly people agreeing.
And that's when the gold rush started.
In the past two weeks, at least 10 managed OpenClaw hosting services launched. I know because I run one of them — EasyAI Start. I'm watching every competitor appear in real-time, reading every launch tweet, tracking every pricing page.
Here's what I'm seeing from the inside.
The Problem Everyone's Solving
The gap between "starring a GitHub repo" and "actually running OpenClaw in production" is enormous. Here's what real users are saying:
From Twitter: One user spent seven hours going back and forth with ChatGPT and Gemini trying to get setup working, hit a 400 error, and quit. Another said plainly: "It just asks you for 15 different API keys. I gave up."
On Reddit, r/selfhosted has a post titled "Self-hosting OpenClaw is a security minefield" with 116 upvotes. Another user tried GCP, Hostinger, and Hetzner — all had dealbreakers. Someone ran their bot for 3 days and spent $200, projecting $2K/month in API costs.
The market is validated. The demand is real. The question is: who's going to serve it well?
The Competitors (As of Feb 13, 2026)
I've tracked every managed OpenClaw hosting service I could find. Here's the landscape:
| Service | Starting Price | Key Differentiator | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ampere.sh | Free + $500 credits | One-click deploy, 643+ agents | Hit capacity at launch (15/15) |
| MyClaw.ai | $19/mo | Best landing page in the space | Live, claims 10K reservations |
| xCloud | $24/mo | Established host, 30+ locations | Live, enterprise-grade |
| ClawHosters | €19/mo | EU-only, GDPR, free LLM | Live, Hetzner Germany |
| SimpleClaw | ~$44/mo | $17K MRR in 5 days | Listed for sale within a week |
| SpawnHQ | Unknown (crypto) | Team collaboration | Domain not resolving |
| OpenClawd AI | Unknown | Yahoo Finance PR | Live, PR-heavy launch |
| ClawHost | Open-source | MIT licensed, self-hostable | Tool, not a service |
| StartClaw | Free trial | Building in public | Early stage |
| ClawFast | Unknown | SEO/content-first | Live |
Plus Hostinger, Contabo, and DigitalOcean have all added OpenClaw one-click templates to their VPS offerings. So has basically every VPS provider with a marketing department.
What Everyone's Getting Wrong
1. Racing to the Bottom on Price
The most obvious pattern: everyone's competing on price. $24/mo. $19/mo. Free with credits.
Here's the problem. A VPS that can actually run OpenClaw properly costs $5-10/mo wholesale. Add management overhead, support, and margin, and you're looking at thin margins below $30/mo. The companies offering $19/mo hosting are either:
- Running on razor-thin margins hoping for volume
- Planning to raise prices later (classic growth hack)
- Not actually providing the support they promise
Ampere's free tier with $500 in Opus credits is the most aggressive play. It's a classic VC-subsidized land grab. But they hit their 15-container capacity limit on launch day. When you can't keep the lights on at 15 users, "free" doesn't mean much.
2. Launching Without Support Infrastructure
SimpleClaw hit $17K MRR with 397 subscribers in 5 days. Impressive. Then a user reported it crashed after one interaction and got no support for 24+ hours. Then the 18-year-old creator listed the whole thing for sale — first at $2.25 million, then $225K the next day.
Getting users is the easy part. Supporting them is the hard part. Most of these services launched in a week and have zero support infrastructure. The first wave of angry customers is coming.
3. Ignoring the Real Cost
Every hosting service focuses on server costs. Nobody talks about the real expense: LLM API bills.
Hosting OpenClaw costs $5-24/mo. Running it costs $50-500/mo in API fees depending on usage. The hosting is 10-20% of the real cost. Users discover this after signing up, and they're angry at the hosting provider even though it's an API problem.
The smart play is what ClawHosters does: include free LLMs (Gemini Flash, Deepseek) out of the box, then let users bring their own keys for premium models. Set expectations upfront.
4. No Differentiation Beyond "One-Click Deploy"
Every single competitor uses the same tagline: "No Docker. No terminal. No DevOps. Deploy in 60 seconds."
When everyone says the same thing, nobody stands out. The commodity phase is already here — two weeks into the market existing.
What Actually Matters
After running my own OpenClaw hosting service and watching this market explode, here's what I think actually matters:
Reliability Over Features
Ampere launched with one-click deploy, Chrome pre-installed, cron scheduling, and every integration. Then they hit capacity at 15 users. Users don't care about features if the service is down. Boring, reliable hosting beats flashy, broken hosting every time.
Support Is the Product
OpenClaw is complex software. Things break. API keys expire. Models change. The hosting service that wins will be the one that actually helps users when something goes wrong — not the one with the best landing page.
Trust Takes Time
10 services launched this week. 7 of them will be dead in 3 months. Users know this. The services that build trust through consistency — uptime, support, honest communication — will survive. The ones optimizing for Twitter virality won't.
EU Compliance Is an Actual Advantage
ClawHosters runs exclusively on Hetzner in Germany. That's not just marketing — it's a real selling point for European businesses and anyone who cares about GDPR. Most competitors don't even mention where their servers are.
The Uncomfortable Questions
Here's what keeps me up at night as someone building in this space:
What if OpenClaw makes setup easy? The entire market exists because setup is hard. If the OpenClaw team ships a polished installer or official cloud version, every hosting service becomes unnecessary overnight. This is the biggest existential risk.
What if VPS providers eat the market? Hostinger and Contabo already have one-click OpenClaw templates. DigitalOcean has a community tutorial. These companies have millions of existing customers and infrastructure we can't match. They just haven't focused on it yet.
What about security? OpenClaw has root access to the host machine by default. r/selfhosted is full of warnings about token leakage, gateway hijacking, and remote code execution. One major security incident affecting a managed hosting provider could tank the entire market's reputation.
Is this a market or a moment? OpenClaw is trending NOW. The setup is hard NOW. Both of those things could change in months. Is managed OpenClaw hosting a sustainable business, or a short window?
My Honest Take
I think 2-3 managed OpenClaw hosting services will survive the next 6 months. The rest will either shut down, get acquired, or pivot.
The winners will be the ones that:
- Don't try to be the cheapest — compete on trust and service quality
- Actually support their users — not just deploy and disappear
- Build relationships — customers who know you don't leave for $20/mo savings
- Stay honest about costs — hosting is cheap, API bills are not, users need to know this
- Specialize — "OpenClaw for [specific use case]" beats "OpenClaw for everyone"
The gold rush is on. The question isn't whether there's gold — there is. The question is whether you're building a mine or just panning in a stream that'll dry up next season.
I'm building a mine. We'll see if I'm right.
Disclosure: I run EasyAI Start, a managed OpenClaw hosting service. I've tried to be honest about competitors' strengths and our own weaknesses. Take my analysis with that context in mind.