ClawBox vs Cloud VPS

It depends on what you would rent instead. ClawBox is € 749 one-time plus roughly € 0,80/month in electricity (about € 778 before VAT over 3 years). A comparable always-on cloud VPS runs € 16–24/month — € 576–864 over 3 years for CPU-only instances, or € 3.240–5.400 for a GPU instance — so the cheapest CPU-only plans, a Hetzner CX31 or AWS Lightsail, do come in lower over three years, while a DigitalOcean droplet does not. The catch with CPU-only plans is speed: about 1-2 tokens/second on local LLMs, against roughly 23 on ClawBox. And unlike a rental, you still own the ClawBox hardware after year 3.

Break-even depends on the plan you'd otherwise rent: about 47 months versus a Hetzner CX31, around 32 months versus a DigitalOcean droplet, and roughly 5 months versus an AWS GPU (g4dn) instance. After that point ClawBox saves you € 16–150 every month, indefinitely.

With a cloud VPS your prompts, emails, voice, and files travel over the internet to a provider's datacenter (often in another country) and are processed on shared infrastructure. With ClawBox everything is processed on the device sitting on your desk — nothing leaves your local network unless you choose to send it.

Most affordable VPS plans (AWS Lightsail, Hetzner, DigitalOcean) are CPU-only, which means roughly 1-2 tokens/second on local LLMs. GPU instances exist but cost € 90–150+/month. ClawBox includes 67 TOPS and 1024 CUDA cores, delivering about 23 tokens/second on a 3B model at no extra hourly charge.

If your connection drops, a cloud VPS becomes unreachable and your AI stops working. ClawBox runs entirely on your local network, so voice, local models, and smart-home automations keep working offline. You also avoid surprise price changes and vendor lock-in, since you own the hardware outright.