ShipClaw vs ClawHosted: their pitch is "under 5 minutes," ours is ~60 seconds. Beyond setup speed, here's the real feature, pricing, and architecture diff.
They market themselves as: “ClawHosted – Deploy OpenClaw in Under 5 Minutes” — visit ClawHosted
ClawHosted's marketing line is "deploy in under 5 minutes," which is honest — that's what a clean OpenClaw provisioning flow looks like when you spin up a fresh instance per user. ShipClaw's architecture is what makes 60 seconds possible: instead of provisioning a new instance on every signup, we pool capacity and spawn the OpenClaw process on demand inside an already-warm container. The user-facing effect is that you skip the multi-minute VM/install/DNS step, which is most of the gap between "60 seconds" and "under 5 minutes." After setup, the differences track the rest of the lineup: ClawHosted is a flat-monthly managed deploy of upstream OpenClaw, ShipClaw is pay-per-credit with a stealth browser bundled. If your bot is a long-running, steady workload and you don't care about the deploy speed, the choice is genuinely about pricing model and whether you need stealth browsing. If you're prototyping or running multiple bots, the pool architecture and credit billing meaningfully favor ShipClaw.
Captured April 2026. Public pricing changes; check the source for current numbers.
| Vendor | Headline price |
|---|---|
| ShipClaw | $0/mo + pay-per-credit |
| ClawHosted | Monthly plans |
Side-by-side on the rows that actually decide it.
| Feature | ShipClaw | ClawHosted |
|---|---|---|
| Time to first Telegram message | ~60s | Under 5 minutes |
| Pricing model | Pay-per-credit | Flat monthly plans |
| Stealth browser engine | ||
| Provisioning model | Pool, no per-deploy VM | Per-deploy provisioning |
| BYOK required | Plan-dependent | |
| Idle cost | $0 | Plan minimum |
| Multi-agent per account | Plan-dependent | |
| Resource isolation | Per-user process + memory watchdog | Per-deploy instance |
Specific to ShipClaw vs ClawHosted.
Architecture. ClawHosted provisions a new instance per user on signup, which means VM creation, OpenClaw install, and DNS — that's where the "under 5 minutes" comes from. ShipClaw runs a shared pool of pre-warm containers and spawns the OpenClaw process for your account on demand, so the deploy step is just "add user to pool" rather than "build a server."
No. ClawHosted ships upstream OpenClaw, which uses standard Chromium. ShipClaw bundles a stealth browser engine — Cloudflare/Turnstile/reCAPTCHA bypass — that's the practical difference once your agent has to interact with bot-protected sites.
On ClawHosted, agent count is typically gated by plan tier. On ShipClaw, multiple agents share one credit balance and one account, no plan tier change required. If you expect to run several agents, ShipClaw is the simpler model.
See more comparisons on the ShipClaw alternatives index.
Every instance comes with a stealth browser engine, CAPTCHA bypass, and autonomous web actions built in. Your agent doesn't just talk — it browses, searches, and gets things done.
Get StartedNo credit card required. No servers to manage. Ever.