I went down a very familiar rabbit hole this week. It started with the classic Reddit take: why pay for hosting when you can run OpenClaw on an old laptop or a mini PC you already own? At first, that sounds efficient. If you already have the hardware, why not turn it into a 24/7 agent box and save money? Then I kept reading threads from people who had actually done it. And the more I looked at the setup, the less this felt like "cheap infrastructure" and the more it felt like "converting cloud spend into weekend ops work." If you're running AI agents, browser automations, or OpenClaw workflows, here's the practical version. The hardware is not the expensive part Yes, you can self-host OpenClaw. That's not in question. OpenClaw is designed for it. The gateway runs on your own machine or server. The setup is straightforward enough if you're comfortable with Node, Docker, browser automation, and provider credentials.…