I Self-Hosted an AI Agent That Works on WhatsApp, Telegram & Discord — Here's How

I've been running OpenClaw for a while — connecting it to Telegram, WhatsApp, and Slack as my daily AI assistant. Here's a step-by-step walkthrough to get it up and running in under 30 minutes. Step 1: Install OpenClaw The fastest way — one command: curl -fsSL https://openclaw.ai/install.sh | bash Or if you prefer npm: npm install -g openclaw@latest openclaw onboard Requirements : Node.js 22+ (Windows users need WSL2). The onboard command walks you through initial setup — API key, model selection, and your first channel connection. The whole process takes about 5 minutes. You can also install via pnpm, or git clone the repo if you want to hack on it. There's even a macOS companion app in beta. Step 2: Pick Your AI Model OpenClaw is model-agnostic. Here are your options: Model Best For Cost Claude Sonnet Best balance of speed & quality ~$3/1M tokens Claude Haiku Budget-friendly, fast responses ~$0.25/1M tokens GPT-4o Alternative if you prefer OpenAI ~$2.50/1M tokens Ollama (local) Free,