OpenClaw Free Trial: 5 Days Free + $5 AI Credit, No Credit Card

The only managed OpenClaw provider offering a genuine free trial: 5 days, $5 in AI credits, no credit card required, agent live in under 5 minutes.

Most AI agent hosting providers have two options: pay upfront or spin it up yourself. ClawTrust is the exception. Our free trial lets you run a fully provisioned, hardened OpenClaw agent for 5 days with $5 in AI credits included, and you do not need a credit card to start. If it does not deliver value in those 5 days, you cancel and pay nothing. That is the deal.

This post covers everything you need to know: what the trial includes, what you can realistically accomplish in 5 days, how to get the most out of $5 in AI credits, and how this compares to the so-called "trials" offered by xCloud, Hostinger, and others.

What Is the ClawTrust OpenClaw Free Trial?

The ClawTrust free trial is a 5-day, no-credit-card access period that gives you a fully managed OpenClaw agent on a dedicated, hardened virtual private server. Everything is provisioned automatically in under 5 minutes. You do not configure servers, install Docker, write YAML, or debug networking. You sign up, pick a plan, and your agent is running.

The trial is available on Starter ($79/mo) and Pro ($159/mo) plans. The Starter trial gives you a 3 vCPU, 4GB RAM dedicated VPS. The Pro trial gives you 4 vCPU, 8GB RAM. Both include $5 in AI credits from OpenRouter, which is enough for hundreds of real interactions with your agent.

The trial is not a limited demo environment. It is the same infrastructure that paying customers use, with the same security hardening, the same skill integrations, and the same 15+ messaging channel connections. The only limitation is that it lasts 5 days and includes a fixed $5 AI budget rather than your chosen tier's full monthly budget.

After 5 days, you decide. Add a payment method and keep your agent running without interruption. Or cancel, and your server is deprovisioned with no charge on your end.

What You Get: 5 Days + $5 in AI Credits, No Credit Card

Here is everything included in the free trial, with no upsell gating:

• Dedicated VPS: A real server (not a container on shared infrastructure) provisioned in under 5 minutes. 3 vCPU and 4GB RAM on Starter, 4 vCPU and 8GB RAM on Pro.
• Zero open ports: Your agent connects to the outside world through an encrypted outbound Cloudflare tunnel. There are no exposed SSH ports, no public IPs that attackers can scan, and no firewall rules to configure.
• 7 automated security layers: Including an endpoint detection and response plugin that monitors tool calls against 33 regex rules covering 11 MITRE attack categories. This runs on every agent action in real time.
• 6 pre-vetted skills: GitHub (PR reviews, issue summaries, code search), Cal.com (calendar management and scheduling), email identity (send and receive from your agent's address), credentials vault (API key storage without exposing values to the agent), Vapi voice (voice call handling), and core agent capabilities.
• 15+ messaging channels: Connect Telegram, Slack, WhatsApp, Discord, and more. Channels are set up through the dashboard without any code.
• Browser automation: Your agent can browse the web, research topics, fill out forms, and extract data from sites using a bundled Chromium instance. This is included at every tier, including the trial.
• Team brain memory: Persistent per-agent memory that learns your preferences, contacts, and processes across conversations. Available during the trial.
• $5 in AI credits: Applied automatically via OpenRouter. Covers hundreds of typical messages or dozens of research and analysis tasks. You can also bring your own API key to skip using the included credits.
• BYOK support: Connect your own OpenRouter, Anthropic, or OpenAI keys at any time. Your own keys do not count against the $5 budget.
• Hard spending cap: If you exhaust the $5 AI budget, your agent pauses cleanly rather than charging you. No surprise bills, ever.

The trial is designed to give you enough to evaluate the product properly, not enough to frustrate you into upgrading before you are ready.

What Can You Accomplish in 5 Days of Free OpenClaw?

Five days is more than enough to form a real opinion. The question is not whether you can use the agent in 5 days. The question is whether a 24/7 AI agent changes how you work. That answer becomes clear quickly once you start delegating actual tasks.

Here is what a typical trial user can accomplish across those 5 days:

• Connect at least 2-3 messaging channels and verify the agent responds correctly in each
• Install and test 2-3 skills from the pre-vetted library
• Run a real browser automation task (research, form fill, data extraction)
• Watch the agent handle calendar scheduling via Cal.com integration
• Have the agent review a pull request or summarize GitHub issues
• Configure team brain memory and observe it recalling preferences across sessions
• Test the agent from multiple devices or with a colleague
• Send and receive emails through the agent's email identity (Pro plan)
• Observe the EDR security layer in the dashboard, showing which tools are being called

Most trial users reach a clear decision within 48-72 hours. Either the agent is genuinely saving them time (and $79/mo is an obvious yes), or it is not the right fit and they cancel cleanly.

Day-by-Day Free Trial Guide

Here is a suggested path through the 5-day trial to make sure you evaluate what matters most.

Day 1: Your Agent Is Live in Under 5 Minutes

Sign up at /tenants/new, choose your plan, and watch the provisioning progress bar. By the time you have read through the welcome email, your agent is running on a dedicated VPS with zero open ports and all 6 skills loaded.

Your first tasks for Day 1: connect Telegram or Slack (takes about 2 minutes each), give your agent a name and personality via the system prompt editor in the dashboard, send your first message, and test it with a real task you would normally do yourself. A research question, a quick summary, a code snippet, anything you would normally open another tab for.

The goal of Day 1 is simple: make sure the basics work and get a feel for response quality on real tasks. Most users are surprised at how fast setup is and spend Day 1 just exploring.

Day 2: Skills and Integrations

Day 2 is for integrations. Install the GitHub skill from the skills panel and connect your repository. Run a PR review or have the agent summarize your open issues. If your team reviews code regularly, this alone can save hours per week.

Next, connect your Cal.com calendar and test scheduling. Ask the agent to check your availability, block time, or send a booking link. If you take meetings, this is one of the fastest ways to see the agent pay for itself. Scheduling coordination is low-value work that agents handle well.

Day 3: Browser Automation and Memory

Day 3 is for browser automation. Ask the agent to research a competitor, summarize a page that requires JavaScript to render, fill out a form, or extract structured data from a site without an API. Browser automation is the capability that surprises trial users most, because it handles tasks that other AI tools cannot touch.

Also on Day 3: configure team brain memory. Tell the agent your preferences, introduce yourself, share context you want it to remember. Then end the session and start a new one. Observe what it recalls. Memory is what turns a generic AI into something that actually knows how you work.

Day 4: Stress Test and Collaboration

Day 4 is for pushing the limits. Invite a colleague to test the agent from their Slack account. Send it complex multi-step tasks. Ask it to do something that requires combining skills: research a topic via browser, create a GitHub issue with the findings, and send you a summary via Telegram. Observe where it excels and where it needs better prompting.

If you need voice capabilities, Day 4 is also when to configure the Vapi integration and test a voice call. The agent can handle inbound calls, answer questions, and route complex requests back to you through a messaging channel.

Day 5: Decide

Day 5 is decision day. By now you have 4 days of real data. The agent has either changed how you work or it has not. The decision is straightforward:

• If the agent is worth $79/mo to you: add a payment method before the trial ends and keep running without interruption. Your configuration, memory, and integrations carry over exactly.
• If it is not the right fit right now: cancel. Your server is deprovisioned at end of day 5. No charge.

There is no dark pattern here. No "add card to continue" prompt on Day 1. No hidden charge if you forget to cancel. The trial ends when it ends, and you decide with a full information.

What $5 in Free AI Credits Actually Gets You

Five dollars sounds like a small number. In practice, it is enough to genuinely evaluate an AI agent. Here is what $5 in OpenRouter credits covers at typical usage rates:

• 400-600 typical conversational messages: Standard back-and-forth questions, task delegation, and follow-ups using a mid-tier model like GPT-4o or Claude Haiku. Enough for 80-120 interactions per day across 5 days.
• Roughly 50 research or analysis tasks: Tasks that require the agent to think through a problem, synthesize information, or produce structured output. More token-intensive than simple chat but still well-covered.
• About 20 long document summaries: Processing a full PDF, GitHub repo, or web page and producing a detailed summary. These consume more tokens per call but $5 covers more than a week of typical document work.
• 5-10 browser automation sessions: Sessions where the agent opens a browser, navigates to pages, extracts data, and returns structured results. These are the most token-intensive tasks but still meaningful sample size.

Most trial users do not exhaust the $5 budget. The hard cap is there to protect you, not to push you toward an upgrade. If you do exhaust it before Day 5, it means you are using the agent heavily enough that the paid plan is an obvious value decision.

One more thing: if you bring your own API key (OpenRouter, Anthropic, or OpenAI), your own tokens are used instead of the $5 credit. This is useful for high-volume testing or if you want to try a specific model not in the default routing.

OpenClaw Free Trial vs Money-Back Guarantee: Why the Difference Matters

The phrase "free trial" is used loosely in the hosting industry. Most providers offering "trial" access are actually offering money-back guarantees, which are fundamentally different.

The practical difference matters more than the label. A money-back guarantee puts the financial and time risk on you upfront. You pay, set things up, use the product, decide you do not want it, then initiate a refund and wait for it to process. That process involves real friction: a charge on your card, potential holds, a support ticket, and the time risk of having already built something you then tear down.

A genuine free trial inverts that. You evaluate first. You commit money only after you have decided the product is worth it. There is no refund process because there was never a charge. The risk is entirely on us to deliver a product good enough that you want to keep it after 5 days.

Hostinger's 30-day window sounds generous until you realize that most of those 30 days are spent doing what ClawTrust does automatically: installing Docker, configuring OpenClaw, setting up networking, debugging YAML, and wiring up channels. By the time you have a working agent on Hostinger, you may have 10-20 hours invested. At that point, "did I want this?" is no longer an objective evaluation. It is sunk-cost reasoning.

With ClawTrust, you have a working agent in 5 minutes and 5 days to form an honest opinion.

Why Other OpenClaw Providers Don't Offer Free Trials

Genuine free trials are expensive to offer. When we provision a trial account, we spin up a real VPS, configure a Cloudflare tunnel, load 6 skills, connect all channel integrations, and absorb the infrastructure cost. We do that before you have paid us anything. If you cancel on Day 5, we absorb that cost entirely.

Providers that offer money-back guarantees instead of free trials are solving a simpler math problem. You pay them first. Even if they refund, they had cash float during the refund window and they kept the payment on a percentage of people who forgot to cancel or decided the refund process was not worth the effort.

We offer a genuine free trial because we are confident in the product. A managed OpenClaw agent with zero-open-port networking, 7 security layers, automated provisioning, and 6 pre-vetted skills is a meaningfully different product from a bare VPS with OpenClaw installed. We think you can see that difference in 5 days, and we are willing to absorb the infrastructure cost to let you prove it to yourself.

There is also a longer-term reason. Customers who tried the product before paying churn at dramatically lower rates than customers who paid before evaluating. A trial removes the cognitive dissonance of "did I make the right call?" because you already know the answer before you committed. That alignment between expectation and reality produces better customers, not just more of them.

How to Start Your Free OpenClaw Trial

Starting the trial takes under 5 minutes. Here is the exact process:

Step 1: Pick your plan. Go to /tenants/new and choose Starter (3 vCPU, 4GB RAM, $79/mo after trial) or Pro (4 vCPU, 8GB RAM, $159/mo after trial). Both include the same 5-day free trial and $5 in AI credits. The difference is hardware scale and the Pro plan's email identity feature.

Step 2: Configure your agent. Give your agent a name and set its initial personality in the configuration screen. You can update this at any time from the dashboard, so do not overthink it. Choose which messaging channel you want to connect first (Telegram is the easiest for a first connection).

Step 3: Start using it. Provisioning completes in under 5 minutes. You will receive a notification when your agent is live. Open your chosen messaging channel, send a message, and verify the agent responds. Then start working through the Day-by-Day guide above.

There is no credit card form during signup. You are not asked for payment information until Day 5, when you decide whether to keep the agent. If you do not add a payment method, the agent is deprovisioned at end of day 5. No charge, no follow-up emails demanding you reconsider, no friction.

Free Trial to Paid: What Changes After Day 5

If you decide to keep your agent, the transition from trial to paid is seamless. Here is exactly what changes and what stays the same:

What stays the same:

• Your VPS and all its configuration carry over with no interruption
• All skills you installed remain installed
• All channel connections remain active
• Your agent's memory and team brain data carry over
• Your system prompt and personality settings carry over
• Your BYOK API keys (if connected) remain connected

What changes:

• Your $5 trial AI credit is replaced by your plan's full monthly AI budget: $5 per month on Starter, $10 per month on Pro
• Billing begins on the day you convert, not at the end of the original trial period
• You gain access to the full support tier for your plan

What happens if you do not convert:

• At the end of Day 5, your VPS is deprovisioned automatically
• Your configuration data is retained for 30 days in case you return
• No charge is made. No refund is needed because no payment was taken.

The Starter plan at $79/mo works out to about $2.60 per day. If an AI agent saves you even 30 minutes of work per day at any reasonable hourly value, the math is straightforward. The trial is there to help you confirm that before you commit.

For teams evaluating the Pro plan: the Pro tier adds email identity (your agent gets its own email address it can send and receive from), Python execution, and dedicated onboarding support for configuration. If your use case involves email management or custom scripting, those features are worth testing on the Pro trial specifically.

For organizations with more complex requirements, the Enterprise plan at $299/mo includes 8 vCPU and 16GB RAM, a $30/mo AI budget, GPU-ready infrastructure, and a dedicated onboarding session. Enterprise does not include a self-serve free trial, but contact us and we will arrange a guided demo on live infrastructure.

The bottom line is that the free trial exists because we are confident in what we built. A fully managed OpenClaw agent with hardened networking, automated provisioning, and a real skill ecosystem is the easiest way to run an AI agent in production. Five days is enough to know whether that is true for your use case. We just need you to try it.