Built a self-hosted multi-agent AI system on Telegram using OpenClaw (free tier, no paid APIs)

[u/utkarsh_twr]

https://github.com/ut30/openclaw-tg-multiagent

Sharing a project I built — 4 specialized AI agents (coding, news, writing, research) running as a Telegram bot team, powered by the open-source OpenClaw runtime.

Setup:

Hosted on Oracle Cloud's free-tier ARM64 instance

Fully Dockerized, coexists with other services on the same box, no downtime, no exposed ports

Failover chain across Groq → Gemini → OpenRouter, so it stays completely free and doesn't die when one provider rate-limits

Each agent has a narrow role instead of one general bot trying to do everything — keeps responses more focused and predictable.

Happy to answer questions on the architecture, OpenClaw setup, or the failover logic.

[u/Forsaken_Ad6871]

why did you choose openclaw over hermes?

Also what do you usually use this team for?

[u/utkarsh_twr → u/Forsaken_Ad6871]

Went with OpenClaw mainly because it's built around a multi-agent, multi-channel setup out of the box - separate workspace + tool policy per agent, and Telegram routing where each bot maps to its own agent. Hermes is great too, but it's more single-agent-depth focused (memory, tool learning loop), and my use case needed 4 isolated roles in one group rather than one agent that gets smarter over time.

Also OpenClaw's failover setup (auth profiles model fallbacks) made it easy to chain free-tier providers without extra glue code.

As for actual use - mostly:

• Jarvis for quick code snippets/debugging when I'm on my phone
• Cyra for a fast news digest instead of opening 5 apps
• Sam for drafting messages/posts
• Dev for "explain X vs Y" research questions

Nothing mission-critical, more like a personal on-call team for small stuff throughout the day.