What happens when you press the button
1
A seat is claimed
If your plan has a free seat, it is taken. If it does not, the screen shows a
plan chooser instead of the form — with your typed name kept — and checkout
returns you here.
2
A provider key is issued
The agent gets its own model key with a spending limit. Until the first
deploy the agent has no key at all, which the balance panel states plainly
rather than showing a misleading
$0.00.3
A container and a volume are provisioned
One virtual machine and one block volume, for this agent alone. The volume
outlives restarts, redeploys and version upgrades.
4
OpenClaw starts inside it
The platform writes a starting configuration once, on first boot, and never
again. From that point the config file belongs to the agent — nothing on the
platform overwrites it.
The budget line
Before you create, the screen states what the agent starts with — and zero is a real answer that gets said out loud: “No budget yet — it will start and wait.” An agent with no money still deploys and still runs. It cannot make a model call until there is something to spend, and it will sit quietly rather than failing.Created, but not started
Two outcomes look like failure and are not the same:There is no room on the platform right now
There is no room on the platform right now
Capacity is finite. The agent exists, its seat is paid for and stays
yours, and starting it again costs nothing. The page offers to retry, and a
queue position is shown while it waits.
The platform could not start it
The platform could not start it
A failure notice appears above everything else on the agent’s page,
classified where the container said enough to classify it — configuration,
image, or runtime. It carries a contact-support action with the detail
pre-filled.