I don’t think my little $14/month server for OpenClaw is cutting it anymore. But Hetzner seems to have doubled their prices, so not sure about upgrading in place. Maybe everyone ordering Mac minis had the right idea. Even with new Apple prices, a Mac mini is a better deal over 1-2 years.

@manton Investments made in long term intervals tend to pan out. Envious of those who stocked up on homelabs before the RAM crisis

@jacky.wtf Yeah, I should’ve made this decision a year ago.

@manton you have the server doing a ton of concurrent work? I presume at $14 you're not doing any local inference.

What do you have that vps doing?

@RyanParsley No local inference, it all goes GPT-5.6. It’s not doing much, just some occasional work updating docs and code. But feels too small even for that, hangs sometimes.

@manton @RyanParsley you should give paperclip.ing a look, it might be more right-sized for what you’re running

@manton OHV prices still seem fairly low, and unlike Hetzner have inexpensive US-based options. But the $899 Mac mini definitely gets you a lot more hardware, although cloud resiliency is nice aside from waiting out prices (that, in all honesty, may be permanently gone either from RAM or inflation)

I think if I were going to bite the bullet on any local hardware right now I would try to piggy back off a Steam Machine mostly sitting idle. But I already let my Switch and PS5 sit unplayed, so 2017 iMac it remains :)

@manton Although one thing I keep meaning to look into is Cloudflare’s Moltworker… they are usually stupendous on pricing. Though I need to see how OpenClaw’s project management compares to Hermes, which is where I’m playing at the moment.