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robthompson2018 commented on Show HN: Klaus – OpenClaw on a VM, batteries included   klausai.com/... · Posted by u/robthompson2018
ericlevine · a day ago
> Connecting your email is still a risk.

> If you’ve built something agents want, please let us know. Comments welcome!

I'll bite! I've built a self-hosted open source tool that's intended to solve this problem specifically. It allows you to approve an agent purpose rather than specific scopes. An LLM then makes sure that all requests fit that purpose, and only inject the credentials if they're in line with the approved purpose. I (and my early users) have found substantially reduces the likelihood of agent drift or injection attacks.

https://github.com/clawvisor/clawvisor

robthompson2018 · a day ago
Would love to see any evals you've run of this system
robthompson2018 commented on Show HN: Klaus – OpenClaw on a VM, batteries included   klausai.com/... · Posted by u/robthompson2018
_joel · a day ago
Your average user spends £50 a month? How long have you been running, just wondering since OpenClaw was only released (as openclaw) a month ago.
robthompson2018 · a day ago
We have been live since Feb 7.

Maybe $50 a month is an underestimate because our average user has been live for less than a month.

robthompson2018 commented on Show HN: Klaus – OpenClaw on a VM, batteries included   klausai.com/... · Posted by u/robthompson2018
jimbob45 · a day ago
Would having a locally-hosted model offset any of these costs?
robthompson2018 · a day ago
Our starter plan gives you a machine with 2GB of RAM. You will not be able to run a local LLM. OpenRouter has free models (eg Z.ai: GLM 4.5 Air), I recommend those.
robthompson2018 commented on Show HN: Klaus – OpenClaw on a VM, batteries included   klausai.com/... · Posted by u/robthompson2018
Tharre · a day ago
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.

robthompson2018 · a day ago
I don't follow your argument about getting pwned.

A user could leave malicious instructions in their instance, but Clawbert only has access to that user's info in the database, so you only pwned yourself.

A user could leave malicious instructions in someone else's instance and then rely on Clawbert to execute them. But Clawbert seems like a worse attack vector than just getting OpenClaw itself to execute the malicious instructions. OpenClaw already has root access.

Re other use cases that don't rely on personal data: we have users doing research and sending reports from an AgentMail account to the personal account, maintaining sandboxing. Another user set up this diving conditions website, which requires no personal data: https://www.diveprosd.com/

robthompson2018 commented on Show HN: Klaus – OpenClaw on a VM, batteries included   klausai.com/... · Posted by u/robthompson2018
hasa · 2 days ago
I get impression that this is automation tool for sales people. Does it do robotic phone calls to try to book meetings with customers?
robthompson2018 · 2 days ago
We certainly have customers who work in sales, but that's not the only use case.

OpenClaw is capable of using ElevenLabs or other providers to make phone calls, but I personally haven't done this and as far as I know none of our customers have either. Is AI good enough at cold calling yet for this to work? I personally would never entertain such a call.

robthompson2018 commented on Show HN: Klaus – OpenClaw on a VM, batteries included   klausai.com/... · Posted by u/robthompson2018
ndnichols · 2 days ago
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!

robthompson2018 · 2 days ago
Our average user spends $50 a month all-in (tokens and subscription). If you're budget conscious you can use a cheap model (eg Gemini Flash) or even a free one. I confess I am a snob and only use Claude Opus, but even using OpenClaw all day every day I only spend about $500 a month on tokens.

Orthogonal credits are used more frequently by power users. For everyday tasks they'll last a very long time, I don't think any of our users have run out.

Some example Orthogonal user cases:

* customers in sales uses Apollo to get contact info for leads

* I use Exa search to help me prepare for calls by getting background info on customers and businesses

* I used SearchAPI to help find AirBnbs.

Point taken on the copy! We made this writing more technical for the HackerNews audience and try to use less jargon on other platforms.

u/robthompson2018

KarmaCake day64October 29, 2025View Original