What Is the OpenClaw Free Tier?
OpenClaw is an open-source AI agent framework designed to let teams automate complex workflows, connect to external tools, and maintain context across tasks — without the overhead of building agent infrastructure from scratch. The free tier gives individuals and small teams a real taste of what autonomous agents can do, with enough headroom to build meaningful workflows before you ever think about upgrading.
If you're evaluating whether an AI agent platform belongs in your stack, the free tier is genuinely the right place to start. You're not getting a crippled demo — you're getting working infrastructure with real integrations, real memory, and real automation capability.
What's Included in the Free Tier
Monthly Credits
OpenClaw uses a credit-based pricing model, which means you pay for what your agents actually do — not for the number of people on your team. The free tier includes a monthly credit allocation that covers a healthy volume of agent tasks: fetching data from GitHub, creating cards in Linear, drafting emails in Gmail, summarizing Notion pages, and more.
This matters because it removes the most frustrating part of per-seat SaaS pricing: you don't penalize your team for growing. A five-person team and a fifty-person team can both run on the same credit pool if their usage patterns are similar. Credits reset monthly, and you can monitor consumption in real time from your dashboard.
Access to 800+ Integrations via One-Click OAuth
Even on the free tier, you get access to the full integration catalog — over 800 tools connected through one-click OAuth. This includes the tools most engineering and product teams live in every day:
- Project management: Jira, Linear, Asana, Notion
- Code and CI/CD: GitHub, GitLab, CircleCI
- Communication: Gmail, Outlook, Slack
- Data and analytics: Google Sheets, Airtable, Snowflake
- Customer tools: Salesforce, HubSpot, Zendesk, Intercom
Connecting a tool takes about thirty seconds. You navigate to the integrations panel, find the tool you want, click Connect, and complete the OAuth flow. No API keys to copy-paste, no documentation to dig through. The agent has scoped permissions immediately after authorization.
Persistent Memory and Context
One of the features that distinguishes OpenClaw from simpler automation tools is persistent memory. Your agent remembers previous conversations, decisions made in past sessions, and context about your projects and team — across every interaction, not just within a single chat window.
In practice, this means you can tell your agent something once and rely on it later. If you've explained that your team's sprint cycle runs Monday to Friday and your staging deploys happen on Thursdays, that context persists. You don't repeat yourself every session. The agent accumulates working knowledge of your environment over time, which makes it substantially more useful the longer you use it.
Dedicated Server per Team
Free tier users on SlackClaw get a dedicated server for their workspace. This is worth understanding clearly: your agent infrastructure is isolated, not shared with other tenants. Your credentials, your memory store, your integration context — none of it sits in a multi-tenant pool. This is an architectural choice that matters for both performance and security, and it's available from day one, not locked behind an enterprise plan. Learn more about our security features.
Custom Skills
You can extend your agent's capabilities by writing custom skills — small, composable functions that teach the agent how to handle domain-specific tasks. The free tier includes the ability to author and deploy a limited number of custom skills, which is enough to automate the most repetitive workflows your team faces. Learn more about our pricing page.
How to Get Started in Under 15 Minutes
Step 1: Add SlackClaw to Your Workspace
SlackClaw is the layer that brings OpenClaw into Slack natively. Start by visiting the SlackClaw website and clicking Add to Slack. Complete the OAuth authorization for your workspace — this grants SlackClaw the permissions it needs to operate as a bot in your channels and DMs.
Once installed, you'll receive a DM from the SlackClaw bot confirming that your dedicated server has been provisioned. This usually takes under two minutes.
Step 2: Connect Your First Integration
From the SlackClaw dashboard (linked in your onboarding DM), navigate to Integrations. For most engineering teams, starting with GitHub and Linear or Jira gives you immediate value. For product teams, connecting Notion and Jira together unlocks some of the most useful automated workflows.
Click the tool you want to connect, authorize the OAuth flow, and confirm the scopes. You're done. The agent now has access to that tool's data and actions.
Step 3: Run Your First Agent Task
Open a DM with your SlackClaw bot and try a real task. Here are a few that work well as first runs:
Summarize the open pull requests in my GitHub repo that have been waiting more than 3 days.Find all Linear tickets assigned to me that are marked In Progress and list them with their priority.Draft a reply to the last email in my Gmail inbox about the Q3 roadmap.These prompts require no special syntax. The agent parses natural language, identifies which integrations it needs, executes the relevant API calls, and returns a structured response — all within your Slack interface.
Step 4: Teach the Agent Your Context
To get value from persistent memory quickly, spend a few minutes giving your agent foundational context about your environment. You can do this conversationally:
Our main GitHub repo is called platform-api. Our sprint cycles run Monday to Friday. Critical bugs always get a P0 label in Linear. Our staging environment deploys automatically on merge to the staging branch.The agent stores this as persistent context. Future tasks will reference it automatically — so when you ask it to find P0 bugs, it already knows what that label means and where to look.
Step 5: Set Up a Recurring Workflow
One of the most practical uses of the agent is replacing the small, repetitive tasks that interrupt your team's focus. A common starting workflow is a daily standup digest: For related insights, see Use OpenClaw in Slack for Vendor Management.
Every weekday at 9am, check our Linear board for tickets that moved to Done in the last 24 hours, check GitHub for PRs merged yesterday, and post a summary to #engineering-standup.This single workflow eliminates a recurring manual task and gives your team a consistent information artifact every morning without anyone having to compile it.
What the Free Tier Doesn't Include
It's worth being clear about the limits so you can plan accordingly. The free tier has a capped monthly credit allocation — if your team runs high-frequency automations across many integrations, you'll reach that ceiling and need to upgrade. Custom skills are also capped at a small number on the free plan, which is sufficient for experimentation but may feel limiting once you're building more sophisticated workflows.
There's no limit on team members — anyone in your Slack workspace can interact with the agent and benefit from the shared memory and integrations. The credit model means power users don't impose marginal costs on the rest of the team just by existing in the workspace.
When to Consider Upgrading
The right time to move to a paid plan is when you can clearly articulate the value the agent is delivering and that value exceeds the credit cost of running it. Most teams hit this point when they've automated two or three recurring workflows that previously required manual effort, and they want to run those workflows more frequently or add more integrations to the mix.
The free tier is designed to get you to a genuine "this is useful" moment. Upgrading should feel like a straightforward decision because you already know what you're paying for. For related insights, see OpenClaw Slack + Linear Integration: Automate Issue Tracking.
Paid plans increase your monthly credit allocation, raise the cap on custom skills, and unlock priority support — but the underlying architecture, persistent memory, dedicated server, and integration access are the same across all tiers. You're scaling capability, not unlocking features that should have been available from the start.
The Best First Week Checklist
- Install SlackClaw and confirm your dedicated server is active
- Connect at least two integrations you use every day
- Run three manual tasks through the agent that you'd normally do by hand
- Give the agent five to ten sentences of context about your team and environment
- Set up one recurring workflow and let it run for three days
- Review your credit usage in the dashboard to understand your consumption pattern
By the end of that week, you'll have a clear picture of where the agent saves real time and where you want to push it further. That's the foundation for deciding how to invest in the platform going forward — and it costs you nothing but a few minutes of setup to get there.