The cheapest way to start, and the one most people abandon within a month. Not because it is hard to set up, but because of what it asks of you afterwards.
It is free, it is private in the strictest sense, and nothing about it is anyone else's decision. If you want to read every line of what your agent runs, change it, and never send a byte to a company you did not choose, this is the honest answer and we are not going to pretend otherwise. For a hobby project, an experiment, or an agent you talk to only while you are at your desk, it is genuinely the right call.
An assistant that only works while your laptop is open and awake is a program you launch, not an assistant. The whole idea of asking it to watch your inbox or answer a message falls apart the first time you shut the lid on the way out.
For WhatsApp or Telegram to reach a program on your machine, something has to be reachable from the internet. That means a tunnel, a dynamic DNS entry, or an open port on your home router, and each of those is a thing you now maintain and a thing that can be found.
An agent on your laptop has your files, your SSH keys and your logged-in browser. A skill you did not read closely, or a prompt injection in an email it was asked to summarise, is operating with everything you have. There is no boundary because you are the boundary.
Your agent runs on its own machine in Belgium, awake whether or not you are. It reaches WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Slack, Mattermost, Matrix, SMS and, on OpenClaw, the phone network without anything being open on your home network. It runs inside its own gVisor sandbox with its own kernel and its own service account, and it can reach the public web but never our internal network, the cloud metadata server or other tenants, so a bad skill never gets near your home network or anyone else’s agent. Your keys sit encrypted in Google Secret Manager and the running agent only ever holds a temporary stand-in token.
Stay on your own computer if the agent is a project you enjoy maintaining, or if it only needs to work while you are sitting there. Move when you first want it to answer something at three in the afternoon while you are out, or the first time you think about what a skill you installed could actually reach.
Your agent, running on isolated infrastructure in the EU, reachable in the apps you already open.
