Free OpenClaw Gateway with Local LLM on Oracle Cloud

A developer on r/openclaw detailed a method to run OpenClaw Gateway with a local large language model (LLM) for free using Oracle Cloud's free tier. The approach avoids paying for LLM tokens by hosting both components on a cloud instance.

Infrastructure Setup

The solution uses Oracle Cloud's free tier. The ideal free instance shape is VM.Standard.A1.Flex, offering an ARM-based Ubuntu instance with 4 OCPUs, 24GB RAM, and 200GB SSD. However, availability is limited as these machines are only free when someone else deletes their instance.

The author opted for the VM.Standard.A2.Flex shape instead. This shape is not permanently free, but Oracle provides $300 in credits for new accounts, which can cover the cost of running a 4 OCPU, 24GB RAM, 200GB SSD ARM Linux server for approximately six months.

Configuration Steps

• Generate an instance with the specified resources using the VM.Standard.A2.Flex shape.
• Oracle provides a minimized Ubuntu for ARM instances. After starting the instance, run sudo unminimize to get a regular Ubuntu version, which is required for the LLM and OpenClaw.
• The author recommends skipping the Docker version of OpenClaw, stating it is hard to configure, and instead installing the native version.
• Install the Qwen3.5 27B A3B 4-bit model locally on the instance.
• Configure OpenClaw to use this local LLM.

Remote Management

To manage the cloud setup remotely, the author uses an app called "QCAI," available on the Apple App Store and Android. Configuration involves:

• Installing Tailscale VPN on the cloud instance.
• Modifying the OpenClaw openclaw.json configuration file to allow access from the QCAI app.

The QCAI app provides a dashboard for OpenClaw and a "claw-portal" browser-based interface for accessing OpenClaw output, which the author notes is better than using a Telegram text channel. The setup also allows running Claude Code on the Oracle Gateway, with the iOS app providing an interface for remote execution.

The result is a 24/7 OpenClaw Gateway with a local LLM and Claude Code, running for free for six months using the initial Oracle Cloud credits.