Self-Hosting With Proxmox and AI Saves $900 a Year in SaaS

OpenClaw Was Just the Beginning. A $400 Box Replaces $900 in SaaS.

AI coding agents like Claude Code eliminate the setup barrier. A $400 mini PC with Proxmox replaces $900/year in SaaS. Full tutorial included.

Marcus Schuler Feb 24, 2026

Implicator PRO Briefing #012 / 23 Feb 2026

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Hardware recommendations, a full Proxmox setup walkthrough, and the dollar-for-dollar math behind replacing $900 a year in SaaS with a $400 mini PC and an AI coding agent.

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Nobody predicted Peter Steinberger's week. His project, OpenClaw, hit 100,000 GitHub stars in three days and crossed 140,000 within a week, making it the fastest-growing repository GitHub has ever hosted. The open-source AI agent runs on your machine, hooks into your messaging apps, and executes commands on demand. Steinberger, based in Austria, watched the star counter blow past 60,000 in the first 72 hours alone. By early February 2026, it was inescapable, which is a
strange thing to say about a chat-based assistant. Tech Twitter couldn't stop talking about it. A Wikipedia article appeared. Security researchers found more than 135,000 exposed instances online. ClawHub, its community skill registry, accumulated more than 5,700 skills.

And fair enough. Running an autonomous AI agent locally, one that reads your files, automates your workflows, and operates entirely under your control, feels like genuine power. Millions of developers cloned the repo. They generated code, automated a few tasks, and told their friends.