I Set Up a Personal AI Agent for Free. Here's Exactly What Happened.
Dev.to AI
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Generative AI
AI Hardware
Open Source AI
No paid API. No cloud bill. Just a free NVIDIA endpoint, an open-source agent framework, and a Telegram bot that now answers my questions. I've been watching the OpenClaw hype since it blew up in early 2026 - 350k GitHub stars, people buying Mac Minis in bulk to run agents on them. I wanted to try it. But I wasn't going to pay for an API key just to experiment. So I spent an evening figuring out if a genuinely free setup was possible. Here's what I built, what broke, and what actually worked. What Is OpenClaw? OpenClaw is an open-source AI agent that runs on your machine.