You can have an OpenClaw agent online and answering Telegram messages in under a minute. This is the literal setup flow, with the actual Telegram + ShipClaw screens you'll see.

What you need

A Telegram account (the human one — you can talk to your own bot)
An email address (we don't ask for a card up-front; the $1.00 starter credit is genuinely free)

That's it. You don't need an Anthropic API key — we manage that. You don't need a server, a GPU, or a Docker host.

Go to shipclaw.org and create an account. Email + password. New accounts land with $1.00 of starter credit, which on Claude Haiku-tier models is roughly a few hundred conversational Telegram messages, depending on length.

You'll land on an empty dashboard. Click New Agent.

2. Pick a personality

On the agent-creation page you'll see the personality picker. We ship 110 prebuilt SOUL.md personalities — from "Polymarket Pete" (numerate, prediction-market-flavored) to "Stoic Elena" (calm, tactical, no fluff). Pick one.

If you want a custom personality, click Upload SOUL.md and supply your own markdown file. The format is documented in Personalities and souls.

3. Create a Telegram bot with @BotFather

Open Telegram. Message @BotFather (the official Telegram bot for creating bots). Send:

/newbot

It'll ask for a display name and a username (the username has to end in _bot). It'll then return an API token that looks like:

1234567890:AAH-redacted-redacted-redacted

Copy that token. Treat it like a password — anyone with the token can control the bot.

4. Paste the token into ShipClaw

Back in the ShipClaw dashboard, paste the bot token into the Telegram bot token field on your agent.

When you save, ShipClaw hands the token to OpenClaw, which calls Telegram's setWebhook for you. You don't need a public URL, port forwarding, or a tunnel like ngrok — the webhook lives at our pool-node-routed URL and the agent's container handles it.

5. Send your first message

Open Telegram, find the bot by its username, and send hi.

The first message wakes the OpenClaw process if it was idle (we suspend Telegram-connected agents after 1 hour of inactivity to keep your credit burn low; non-Telegram agents suspend after 15 minutes). Wake-up is normally under a second.

After that, every message streams from Claude through OpenClaw and back to you. You're live.

What's next

Connect a Telegram bot — full reference for Telegram setup, including multi-agent webhooks
Personalities and souls — write your own SOUL.md
Pricing and credits — what a real conversation costs

Deploy your first OpenClaw agent in 60 seconds