The honest comparison
How to run an always-on agent — and what you're really choosing between
6 min read · Updated July 2026
Everyone wants the same thing: an agent that stays up, remembers what happened yesterday, and answers wherever work already happens. The hard part was never the model — it's everything around it. Hosting that doesn't sleep. Memory that survives a restart. Channels your team actually uses. And not quietly becoming the ops team. Here's an honest look at the real options, and where each one leaves you.
Strip away the branding and there are four ways to get there: run it yourself, build on a developer platform, rent cheap single-framework hosting, or use a managed agent service. They're not equally good at the same things — each is genuinely strong somewhere. This is how they stack up on the dimensions that decide the day-to-day.
Why not just run it yourself?
The DIY path — OpenClaw on a Mac mini, a bot on a Hetzner box, a Pi under the desk — is the cheapest to start and the most expensive to keep. It sleeps when the host idles and forgets everything past its context window the moment it restarts. Every crash, dependency bump, and expired token is yours to babysit. That's fine for a weekend; by month two it's a second job. Asteroids is that same bot — except it stays up, keeps its memory, and gets maintained without you.
Why not a developer platform?
Claude Managed Agents and OpenRouter Spawn are the serious engineering answers, and both are genuinely good. Claude's is the tightest harness wrapped around the best model — if you're happy on Claude and fine wiring an API key, a beta header, and an SDK, the raw quality is hard to beat. OpenRouter goes the other way: model-agnostic, 600+ models, your keys, your cloud — the anti-lock-in play. But both hand you a toolkit, not a product. There are no channels until you build them, and someone on your team owns the glue and the uptime. Asteroids is what those platforms look like after that someone is finished: the harness, the sandbox, the channels, and connector auth already assembled.
Why not $3 bot hosting?
OpenClaw Launch is our closest analog and, honestly, a good product — a visual configurator that ships a Hermes or OpenClaw agent in about thirty seconds, with real multi-level memory and a shelf of tools. If you only ever want that one framework family and live in Discord or Telegram, it's a fine place to land. The ceiling just arrives quickly: one framework, no Slack, and only as much control as the UI exposes. Asteroids keeps the one-click feel but removes the ceiling — every engine, every channel, and your own system prompt under version control.
So which should you pick?
The honest version: if you're a Claude-only shop with engineers to spare, Claude Managed Agents is the tightest thing going. If you want maximum model choice and don't mind owning infra, OpenRouter Spawn. If you want cheap and simple and never need Slack, OpenClaw Launch. Asteroidsis for everyone else — the one that needs no code, isn't married to a single model or framework, reaches every channel, and then gets out of your way. One click to launch, and you can swap the brain later without losing the thread.
Try it in one click
Launch a long-lived agent on any harness, reach it anywhere, and park it free when you're done. No keys to paste, no infra to tear down.
