I Wanted a Personal AI Assistant on Telegram. Here's What Self-Hosting Taught Me (And Why Hosted is Better Now)

I Wanted a Personal AI Assistant on Telegram. Here's What Self-Hosting Taught Me (And Why Hosted is Better Now) The Dream A few months ago, I wanted a personal AI assistant that lives on Telegram. Not ChatGPT in a chat interface — something actually integrated into my life. Always available. Learns what I do. Manages my email, researches stuff for me, drafts content. I found OpenClaw. 145K GitHub stars. Open source. Does exactly what I wanted. "I'll self-host it," I thought. "How hard can it be?" Very hard, it turns out. The Reality: The Self-Hosting Weekend Here's what self-hosting OpenClaw actually entailed: Friday Evening: Find a VPS provider (DigitalOcean? AWS? Linode?) Decide on specs (how much RAM do I actually need?) Create account, configure security groups SSH into a blank Linux box Friday Night: Install Node.js Clone the OpenClaw repo Read the docs (50 pages of setup) Start hitting environment variable errors Saturday Morning: Debug cryptic errors Install dependencies Configu