DO NOT Use Free AWS for OpenClaw!

OpenClaw on the AWS free tier can cost you $100/month the moment your credits run out — the creator has already moved to a $0.10/hour VPS with 2 GB of RAM.

Why the free tier is a trap

The Amazon EC2 "free plan" still asks for your credit card at signup. Once your free credits burn through, EC2 keeps running and starts billing your card automatically. The creator has heard reports of bills climbing to roughly $100/month "out of nowhere" — a nasty surprise for something labelled free. There is no soft cap.

What he switched to

He migrated OpenClaw to Zebber, picking the $0.10/hour tier. That node ships with 2 GB of memory, which he calls "more than enough to be a personal assistant" for a single-user OpenClaw setup. No credit card gymnastics, no surprise balance.

The migration trigger

The move happened "yesterday" after a friend or community thread flagged the billing risk. Lesson: the moment you read a horror story about a free-tier bill, audit your account, kill the instance, and rotate keys before you get charged.

What you lose vs. what you gain

You give up the AWS brand and easy integration with other Amazon services. You gain a predictable hourly cost, a smaller attack surface, and a box you can tear down in one click without orphaning resources across regions.

Minimum spec that actually works

2 GB RAM is the floor for running OpenClaw as a personal assistant. Anything under that and the model will start swapping or OOM-ing the moment you load context.