Run OpenClaw in the cloud.
We handle the hard parts.
OpenClaw is a powerful open-source gateway for AI agents — built to be self-hosted. Associates AI runs it for you: managed servers, persistent memory, observability, and a security model built for adversarial inputs. No config files, no 2am pager.
What is OpenClaw, and why host it with us?
OpenClaw is an open-source gateway that connects AI agents to the chat apps your team already uses — Slack, Telegram, Discord, email, and more. It's genuinely good software, and it's designed to run on your own hardware, on your own terms.
That self-hosted design is a feature for developers and a burden for everyone else. Running it in production means you own the servers, the secret storage, the scaling story, the security hardening, and the upgrades. The questions people actually search for — how do I scale OpenClaw across systems, how do I manage its secrets, is it ready for production — are all the operational weight that comes with self-hosting.
We carry that weight. Associates AI is the managed OpenClaw platform: your team runs on it in minutes, and the infrastructure is our problem, not yours.
Two honest paths
Self-hosting OpenClaw is the right call if you want total control and have the engineering time to run it. Managed is the right call if you'd rather have a working AI team today. Here's the difference, straight.
Self-hosting OpenClaw
Managed with Associates AI
What we add to the base framework
Managed hosting is the floor, not the pitch. The real value is what we build on top — persistent memory, production-grade observability, and a security model designed for adversarial inputs.
Persistent memory
A dedicated memory service with semantic search, tiered synthesis, audited recall, and temporal state. Your Teammates remember decisions across sessions — and you can inspect why they recalled anything.
Trust architecture
Secrets held behind an egress proxy, read-only identity files, per-agent credential isolation, blocked metadata service, fail-closed boot. Built so a hijacked Teammate still can't leak your keys.
Observability built in
Every Teammate action — model calls, tool invocations, multi-agent handoffs — is traced end-to-end with full timing, token cost, and intermediate output visibility. Drill into any decision to see what context was retrieved, which model was called, and what came back. Per-customer dashboards show latency, error rates, and cost breakdowns by model, by Teammate, by channel — so you can see exactly what your AI org is spending and where it's breaking.
Evaluation & quality scoring
Score Teammate outputs with automated evaluators that check accuracy, relevance, and faithfulness against your source data. Capture human feedback inline. Build test datasets from real production traces and run experiments against new prompts or models before shipping — so you know a change improves quality before it hits production.
Prompt versioning
Every Teammate's system prompt is versioned and stored centrally. Roll back to any prior version. See which prompt produced which output on any trace. Test prompt variants against your datasets, ship the winner, and never lose track of what changed and why.
A dashboard, not YAML
Configure models, skills, channels, and personality through a UI. Teammates propose changes; you review and deploy. No editing raw config, no boot scripts.
Model-agnostic
Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Venice, OpenRouter — every Teammate picks from the set you approve. Transparent list-rate billing, no lock-in.
Multi-agent by design
Teammates coordinate, hand off work, and manage the platform through MCP and a REST API. Build an org chart, not a pile of disconnected bots.
20+ role templates
Ops, sales, marketing, SEO, engineering, support. Start from a template or build your own role. The primitives are the same either way.
Managed OpenClaw, answered
Yes. OpenClaw is open-source and self-hosted by default. Associates AI runs it for you as a managed platform — we provision the agent servers, handle upgrades and uptime, and add memory, observability, and security hardening on top. You get everything OpenClaw does without operating the infrastructure.
No — Associates AI is a managed platform built on the OpenClaw framework. OpenClaw is the open-source engine; we're the hosted, hardened service around it, the way Vercel relates to Next.js or Supabase relates to Postgres.
No, and that's intentional. You configure Teammates through a dashboard that exposes the controls that matter — models, skills, channels, personality — while the lower-level config is managed for you. Teams who want control over every setting can self-host the open-source project directly.
We assume it will happen and design so a hijacked agent can't do damage. Keys sit behind an egress proxy the agent never sees, identity files are read-only, each Teammate has isolated credentials, the cloud metadata service is blocked, and boot fails closed if security components don't start.
No. The platform is model-agnostic — Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Venice, and OpenRouter are all available, and every Teammate picks from the set you approve. Billing is at transparent list rates.
Related reading: Running OpenClaw in production · When to self-host and when not to.