Definitely don't set it up on your own computer. It needs its own machine because it has full access by default.

The general options are Mac mini's, VPS's or my choice a Raspberry Pi.

If you go down the VPS route, you need to think about security more because it will be sitting on the public Internet.

Claude was popular, but Anthropic decided to ban OpenClaw from its services, so most people are using ChatGPT via the Codex OAuth. I use ChatGPT for my main agent TED (just the £20 / month Plus version), but I use other models through a private instance of Ollama for other subagents. 

If you configure it right, you don't need to spend much, if anything on public cloud AIs.

I mostly use it for alerts and monitoring, BTC price, wars, that sort of thing, but it also now runs my website and I have a tech support subagent that runs through Discord dedicated to that. He monitors the site, does security checks, updates, etc.... 

The two most useful LLM gateway services are Ollama and OpenRouter, check them out, they might be useful.

Also, once you've setup your Claw, you can ask it, which models it prefers, it will probably suggest different models for different types of jobs.