Author: Digital Life Khazix

Recently regarding OpenClaw, apart from what I mentioned yesterday about it topping GitHub.

There is another very magical thing.

That is OpenClaw's charge for on-site installation.

One-time fee, ranging from hundreds.

There are even more outrageous prices, which I saw in the group not long ago.

OpenClaw installation, 16,000。。。

They said it was guaranteed and the deposit of 3,000 has already been received.

This just left me stunned, of course, this price cannot possibly be an individual act; I suspect it is very likely for batch installations for a company along with some training.

Because charging 16,000 for installing an OpenClaw seems a bit too outrageous...

I also searched on Xianyu and Taobao.

There are all sorts of strange prices.

But a lot of low-price traffic is more common because most shops do not list the actual prices, so I had to ask customer service one by one.

I asked about a dozen shops, finding online installation prices ranging from dozens to hundreds, mostly between 100 and 200.

The cheapest can be deployed for 30.

Interestingly, I also found a shop, the official store of DeepSeek。

Yes, the DeepSeek official store sells OpenClaw deployment, basic installation for 388, this shop feels like it's run by Liang Wenfeng's second uncle...

I don't know why, but these stores always like to use DeepSeek's avatar, perhaps in the eyes of the vast user base.

This whale represents the cutting-edge technology AI.

And the difference in these services, besides installation, some will also provide access to Feishu and DingTalk, installing some skills, but otherwise, there’s nothing more, and the pricier ones come with so-called VIP technical guidance for a future.

These are basically all remote installations.

The charges for on-site installations in the same city will be slightly higher, generally around 500.

This needs attention; I’m not belittling these services; where there's demand, there's a market—this is more normal.

As for some WeChat resellers, their prices are what I find ridiculous.

It feels like they are purely here to rip people off.

Can you believe a price of 5,000???

Is my little crayfish gilded, needing 5,000 for installation???

I even suspected for a moment if this installation was really for my crayfish.

Then I asked a bit.

This left me even more confused.

In that moment, I felt like I had purchased a service where Huang Renxun personally guided the installation of OpenClaw remotely.

Seriously, because for 5,000, apart from installation, there was no other service, too incredible...

The same thing being charged from 30 to 5,000, you can truly feel how chaotic this market is.

It really reminds me of this time last year.

On-site installation of the DeepSeek all-in-one machine.

Combined with the current sales of OpenClaw installations, a large batch of them all have DeepSeek's avatars, I have very good reason to suspect that these are indeed the same bunch of people.

Moreover, the demand is indeed quite strong.

My judgment on the popularity of crayfish has actually been a bit off; I thought it would start to decline by mid-February, but unexpectedly, the entire index keeps rising.

This has led to more and more people needing crayfish installation services.

One shop on Taobao I found had nearly 10,000 people searching in the last 7 days and 5,000 entered the store.

The reason I didn’t black out the name is because the shop is really called OpenClaw...

Blacking it out feels pointless...

Of course, all research is better done by immersing oneself in the process.

So, I had our kids exert a tremendous effort to uninstall OpenClaw from their computers completely; I guarantee that even Ultraman couldn’t tell we had installed the crayfish it was that clean, even the Feishu bot was deleted from the backend.

Then, I had our kids find an on-site installation service in Beijing to experience the process and conduct a simple survey.

At that time in Spain, when I spoke to the kids at noon, it was already evening back home, so they searched later.

Only 7 replied that day.

Among them, 4 were working people, saying they only had time on weekends and after work, so they couldn't come during weekdays.

The 5th was a college student, and he charged the lowest but replied later, and we had already chosen someone else.

The 6th was just playing around, wasting our precious 10 seconds.

The 7th was the last one we chose, a genuinely on-site guy.

Charging 499 yuan, he visited us and helped install OpenClaw, connected it to Feishu and GitHub, and even said he'd cover the Token consumption for the first month, directly buying us a Lite package on Bailing for Coding Plan.

There’s photographic evidence, we really spent a lot, costing 499 yuan.

During this guy's installation process, we also chatted and got some information.

This guy isn't technically trained; he previously worked in internet operations.

He told us he posted on Xiaohongshu a few days ago after seeing installation posts, thinking he’d give it a try.

To his surprise, many people actually came to ask, and the past few days he has been busy with work, averaging several orders a day.

He also found it quite magical; it turns out there really is demand for this stuff.

So we asked about the demographics of people needing on-site installations.

He said: “If you're asking about industries, there are film and television, media, finance, and friends in the internet asking me to help install. Basically, they are individuals but carrying work-related needs, wanting to use this wave of OpenClaw to optimize their business processes.”

We then asked if he knew what the process was like or what they used it for.

He said, since he just started, he didn’t have enough sample data to say but mentioned he had a friend in e-commerce who uses it to analyze sales data.

When we got to this, we followed up about his own usage situation, and his answer was very candid:

“Actually, I don’t use it much; I don't have much demand for it.”

“Most often, I just use it to push me daily AI news at preset times.”

He was indeed very honest.

When I heard this, a line from a dialogue in “iPartment” came to mind.

“The teacher who gives you employment guidance classes may have never been employed themselves.”

The technician helping you install OpenClaw may not use OpenClaw much themselves...

But thinking about it, this is indeed a very normal phenomenon.

After all, knowing how to install OpenClaw doesn’t require you to know how to use OpenClaw...

This really is a very magical phenomenon.

So actually, everyone can see this; this thing really has no learning cost at all; if you study it yourself, you can figure it out quickly.

Really, if you can research and install it yourself, just do it yourself; there are so many tutorials online; if not, just check my Twitter for installation tutorials; they're all there.

I'm emphasizing this because beyond saving you money, there's one thing that the vast majority of people haven’t noticed or don't care about.

Security.

In yesterday's short article about OpenClaw's rise, I wrote a line that many people highlighted.

Why many big firms like ByteDance, OpenAI, Claude, or Google don't make products like OpenClaw, is it really because of technical barriers?

There’s no such thing as a technical barrier; these are all open-source projects, and the vibe coding projects, everyone can search on GitHub to see how many clones there are.

A very significant reason big firms don’t do it is because they are timid, they are afraid.

Because crayfish directly takes the highest privileges from your system, it can do nearly anything in your place, and it can connect to the internet, and the security is a complete mess; if you run it on a new Mac Mini, that’s fine, but if you put it on your own computer and install some weird plugins or skills that steal your API key or open ports to the public without authentication, do you know how significant a security risk that is?

Just like this website, all the crayfish leaked for various reasons.

They are all default ports.

Everything completely leaked, yet with the highest system privileges.

Honestly, many in the gray industry must be laughing at this; they have never fought such a wealthy battle; each one of them is an extremely lucky meat chicken.

If you don’t know what a meat chicken is, you can search it or ask AI.

So no one in the big firms dares to do it because this security issue is too difficult to solve; you see Claude Code is already very powerful, but there are still some things it can’t do.

For example, when you use remote control, you can make it find any local file you have, but it can only return the path to you; asking it to give you a download link for that file to download it on your phone is absolutely impossible unless you modify it yourself.

Returning back to OpenClaw for on-site installation, the security risks here are indeed greater.

Because you have no way of knowing exactly what the other party is installing for you.

Is it the original version without any backdoors? Or does the crayfish they installed for you contain any skills with backdoors?

If they really installed it for you, would you even be able to find out?

I believe the vast majority of people would not be able to notice at all.

The world is already so unsafe; don’t hand your life over to others.

Security, security, still security.

To speak candidly, I know that many, many people are currently experiencing a kind of fear.

That fear of being left behind by the times, I feel it too.

I fear new tools emerging one after another while I’m always chasing but never catching up.

I fear waking up one day to find that all the years of experience and skills I accumulated have suddenly become worthless.

This kind of fear is very private; it won’t appear in any articles of motivational quotes, nor will it be seen in any big shots' annual summaries, but it exists, in each quiet moment of the night.

So when a new tool comes out, a lot of people rush to install it; they might not even know what this tool can do, but if you don’t install it, you will fall behind. If you fall behind, you are finished.

Then many outcomes are actually like buying a Kindle, downloading a hundred books, and never opening it again. Getting a gym membership, going twice and turning it into a monthly payment. Signing up for online courses, hoarding a pile of paid knowledge products, then forever stuck on the first lesson.

There’s no need; really.

In the 1880s, electricity began to spread in the United States; many factory owners spent big bucks on generators and electric motors to install in their factories. But after installation, many found that production efficiency had not significantly improved.

Because they merely replaced steam engines with electric motors, but the entire layout, processes, and management methods of the factory remained unchanged.

The real efficiency improvement occurred 20 or 30 years later. A new generation of factory managers realized that electricity was not just a new source of power; it should redefine the entire production process.

Thus, factories changed from vertical layouts to horizontal ones, from centralized drives to decentralized ones, from rigid production lines to flexible production lines.

Those who genuinely reaped the benefits of electricity were actually the ones who first understood what electricity really meant.

AI is the same.

This current phase is quite similar to 1880.

Everyone is madly installing, frantically buying equipment, and hoarding tools. But most people are merely using AI to replace what they used to do manually. Using AI to write what they used to write by hand, using AI for information they used to search by hand.

This is certainly useful, but it’s not the true power of AI.

The true power of AI is to make you rethink “Should this thing even be done?” rather than just “How can this thing be done faster?”

But rethinking this is the hardest part.

It requires you to pause, to step out of inertia, to acknowledge that you might have been doing the wrong things all along.

So at this moment, you can really consider, do you really need OpenClaw?

To speak honestly, after that sweet period passed, I've been using it less and less.

The two agent products I have used the longest to date are still:

Claude Code and Codex.

Internally within the company, I have not strongly pushed everyone to use OpenClaw.

But Claude Code and Codex, I forced adoption; everyone could choose one, but had to use both, so now, nearly every position has the ability to develop solutions to address their business pain points independently.

Even HR has created a product for initial resume screening and scoring according to some of our bizarre requirements.

Of course, I say this not because I don’t recommend OpenClaw; it is a great product, although there are some ridiculous aspects in its engineering implementation, and the Token consumption is extremely explosive. However, many of our colleagues are still using it, and we might even release an interesting development tutorial about OpenClaw in the coming days.

What I want to say is that this era has evolved too rapidly.

Everyone has fears; among the people I’ve seen, the more prominent the person, the more fearful they are.

Curiosity and fear might be two sides of the same coin.

Curiosity drives us toward the unknown, while fear drives us not to dare to stand still; these two forces together constitute the entire dynamism of human civilization.

But do not let fear deprive you of your right to think.

Even worse, do not let it deprive you of your safety.

Spend a little more time to research on your own.

This process might be better than just learning how to use a tool in the AI era.