So why not just use Botpress Cloud, Dialogflow, or Amazon Lex? Let me break it down for you.
Cloud platforms lock your conversations on someone else's servers. Every message your users send passes through their infrastructure, gets logged in their databases, and lives under their terms of service. With OpenClaw, you own the data. Every message, every skill invocation, every model interaction stays on your machine.
The cost model is different too. Cloud platforms charge per message or per conversation. OpenClaw costs you only the server it runs on. If you run a local LLM via Ollama, your per-message cost drops to zero after hardware.