Manus is renting cloud computers to its own AI agent. Looks a lot like a paid OpenClaw.

Manus just launched Manus Cloud Computer.

They are now renting Ubuntu 24.04 cloud computers to their own AI agent at $10, $30, or $50 a month.

Basic is 2 vCPU, 1GB RAM, 3GB outbound traffic at $10/mo. Standard is 2 vCPU, 4GB RAM, 10GB traffic at $30/mo. Advanced is 2 vCPU, 8GB RAM, 25GB traffic at $50/mo. Every tier ships with Ubuntu 24.04, an independent public IP, and 1000 Mbps inbound. Storage starts at 10GB and scales up to 500GB.

This is a paid version of OpenClaw.

OpenClaw runs on your own machine, your own VPS, or a Mac Mini in the corner. Free, open source, bring your own AI brain. Manus is solving the bit where you have to set all that up. They run the computer, they run the agent, you plug in a card and use it.

For non-technical users this is a real proposition. $30 a month for Standard gets you a fully managed AI computer with a public IP and a real bandwidth allowance. No SSH keys, no Tailscale config, no debugging why the agent crashed at 3am. The hardest part of running OpenClaw is the part Manus removed.

For anyone already self-hosting, the maths is harder to defend. A $5 Hetzner VPS plus OpenClaw plus your own Anthropic API key is dramatically cheaper and more flexible. The $30/mo Standard tier roughly equates to a $10 VPS plus $20 of Claude API credits. You are paying for the integration and the polish, not the compute.

I am not planning to test it. My OpenClaw setup on the Mac Mini works and I would rather hack on that. But it is worth knowing about. This is the most legitimate “AI computer in the cloud” pricing I have seen, and if a non-technical friend asked me how to play with an AI agent that can actually do things on a computer, I would point them at this before suggesting they spin up a Linux box.

The bigger pattern: agent companies are bundling the computer with the agent. Anthropic shipped it as Claude computer use, now Manus is selling it as a subscription. The line between “AI tool” and “AI infrastructure provider” keeps blurring.