Short answer: no.
I run my OpenClaw agent Fred 24/7 on an old ThinkPad T14 that I bought for about $200. It's stacked on some spiral notebooks at my office. The lid is closed. It just sits there and cranks away.
Here are the actual specs:
- Intel i5-10310U (nothing fancy)
- 16GB RAM
- 475GB SSD
- Arch Linux/Omarchy (free)
That's it. No GPU. No fancy hardware. Just a regular old business laptop that some company probably recycled.
Fred runs on OpenClaw, which is open source and free. He uses Claude as his brain ($200/mo plan), but the actual computer he runs on? $200 one time. And to be fair, you can really do a lot with the $100/mo Claude plan. Shoot, you could probably do a lot even with the $20/mo plan if you use Sonnet. I'm just a little too obsessed.
I've seen people online buying Mac Minis like they're going out of style so they can run OpenClaw. Those start at like $600. You don't need that. A used ThinkPad works perfectly fine. Here's why:
AI agents don't do heavy computing locally. The hard work (the actual AI thinking) happens on Anthropic's servers or OpenAI's servers or wherever. Your local machine just needs to run the agent, manage some files, and make API calls. You don't need a lot for that. A 5 year old laptop handles it just fine.
The only time you'll hit limits is memory. I run Fred pretty hard, and sometimes the gateway peaks at about 10GB of RAM during a heavy session. With 16GB that was tight. So I might upgrade to a little more RAM. But you don't really "need" it, depending on what you're doing.
What about a cloud VPS? I'm by no means a security expert, but I've heard horror stories about people getting drained or getting their info leaked from not setting up a VPS right. If you're not super technical and don't know how to set that up, just buy an old ThinkPad (or any old device for that matter) and run it on that.
Do you even need a separate computer though? Yes. I would not recommend putting OpenClaw on your personal device with your personal info. You're basically giving it free reign of your computer. If someone were to prompt inject it, it could cause serious damage. It could also nuke your computer. This thing gets extremely powerful with the more tools & access you give it, but more power = more risk.
The only caveat would be if you're actually trying to run a large model locally. In that case, an old ThinkPad won't cut it. You'll need something a lot beefier.
But here's a breakdown of what I'm actually paying with this setup:
- ThinkPad: $200 (one time)
- RAM upgrade: $50 (one time)
- Electricity: maybe $3/mo
- OpenClaw: $0
- Claude API: $200/mo (you'd pay this regardless of hardware)
So the hardware is $250 total. That's it. That's the whole setup.
If you're thinking about running an AI agent and you're shopping for hardware, don't overthink it. Find yourself an old used business laptop with at least 16GB of RAM, install Linux, and you're good to go.
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