A friend asked me: why do you help people install OpenClaw for free? What's the point? Is it worth it?
Good question. Many people speculate about motives, assuming something must be hidden behind an act that seems to offer no benefit. I'll just tell you what I actually think.
Two reasons.
Level One: Getting People On Board
I want more people to get inside the AI door, quickly.
Some find this strange—you'd think I'd want to keep it secret, get a head start, and widen the gap. I don't see it that way. This AI wave is too massive; the value it creates isn't something you and I can consume alone. We'd burst our stomachs trying to eat it all.
The image in my mind is a flood. The water is so high that everyone will be swept away. In the end, there may be only one boat, and it can't hold many people.
Who do you want on that boat?
If you help those around you board early, you'll look up later and see familiar faces. If you don't, someone else will take that spot—and you might find that person annoying.
What I see is that AI should have a very low barrier to entry; it's a chance to level the playing field. But reality doesn't match that. Many people's first instinct is to make a quick buck: wrap it in a shell, make a one-click installer, jack up TOKEN prices, and profit from the knowledge gap of those who don't understand tech.
This is an era of hundred-fold opportunities; value can be created everywhere. Is the first thing that comes to your mind really taking money out of poor people's pockets?
OpenClaw itself is free, open-source, and iterating fast. You just spend a little money on official LLM APIs and vote with your wallet. I don't understand why anyone insists on inserting a middleman to harvest profits.
So is that the kind of person you want standing on the same boat as you?
There's another image I find interesting. I use AI to install it for you for free, done in 30 minutes. Even if you finish the installation and feel OpenClaw isn't that great or didn't meet your expectations, you witnessed the entire process of AI operating on your machine with your own eyes. The seed is planted. You know AI can already do this kind of thing; the curiosity remains, and you'll come back sooner or later.
Picture a different scenario. You spend 400 RMB to hire someone to install it on-site. They toil away for a whole morning and finally get it working. You use it for a few days and think, "It's just okay." What's your first reaction? "AI is nothing special," or "This person scammed me out of 400 RMB." The curiosity is gone. By the time AI truly matures, becomes cheaper, and becomes more useful, you won't try it again because the first impression is already ruined. So that 400 RMB may look like profit on the surface, but it's actually pushing people away. Someone who might have had a chance to get in is now blocked by a single bad experience. The installation itself must be done the AI way, letting people enter with zero barrier and no burden, so they can see during the process: oh, it's already at this level.
I think we need to get people on board. Time is too short; this is happening too fast. I actually wanted to promote Claude Code more, because the coding agent is the true driving force of transformation—it's a meta-ability that lets ordinary people take control of their computers with extremely low barriers. But OpenClaw is more user-friendly for regular people, and many are happy to accept it, so that's fine too. As long as I can push the wheel close to them.
Level Two: Training the Troops
Some say, what's so hard about installing OpenClaw? Two commands, admin privileges, done.
It's not that simple. In China, three pitfalls stop 95% of people.
First, network access. Domestically, you can't connect to GitHub; you can't even git clone a repository. Half of people get stuck right here.
Second, model configuration. Many model providers' coding plans are actually quite cost-effective, but configuring the API into OpenClaw has a learning curve. The Bailian coding plan, the Kimi coding plan—they all have different formats, and the documentation is unclear. Many people get stuck at this step.
Third, connecting to Feishu (Lark) or WeChat Work. I don't know what Feishu is thinking—they're promoting OpenClaw themselves, but they won't make local-to-Feishu connection an automated API. How hard could it be? Not hard. But the official team just won't do it. As a result, the process of connecting locally to Feishu is excruciatingly tedious.
These three points combined deter more than 95% of people.
We've proven one thing: the AI agent can indeed handle it. Whether you're on Windows or some weird system environment, open a remote maintenance channel, and it's all done in 30 minutes to an hour. From downloading, to model configuration, to Feishu scripts—fully automated. And what gets installed is the official original version, without any wrapper or secondary processing, making future upgrades and integrations easy.
Someone asked: what's the use of doing this? No money, completely free—what are you after?
My view is that in the future, all business will ultimately be a TOKEN business. How many TOKENs it takes for an agent to do something—that's the final competitive difference. If I can accomplish the same task with the same intelligence level but half the TOKEN consumption, or achieve the same results with a cheaper model, that's what truly holds value.
Every time I help someone install OpenClaw, I'm helping my AI agent accumulate experience. For example: a friend was using the Bailian coding plan; I hadn't seen it before. The model tried this and that for a while, nothing worked. Once we figured it out, that knowledge was captured. Next time we encounter the same situation, it'll be solved in five minutes.
Another person got stuck on the Kimi coding plan API configuration. Every step before and after was fine, but this one just wouldn't work. I took one look—seen it before, changed a config file, done.
A Rare Thing
I rarely come across something that makes everyone happy.
I help people install for free; I feel like I'm helping someone, and I'm happy. The person being helped doesn't have to do anything—they sit there for 20 minutes while something others said would cost 400 RMB gets solved, and they're happy too. Meanwhile, every installation helps my AI agent evolve and helps me validate the product direction. We've also incidentally solved the problem with a better paradigm, so more people get access to more advanced productivity tools faster.
It serves company strategy, serves my personal convictions, and serves product evolution and validation. It makes sense from every angle.
Can we reach the goal of 1,000 free installations? That depends on whether my AI agent is smart enough. If it really works, I can help five people install simultaneously from my phone. No need to worry about wearing me out. Later, we productized this—we built Aima Service, where a single command launches the AI auto-installation.