Kowabunga Documentation

Mission control for AI agents. Manage, orchestrate, and talk to agents running on OpenClaw, Hermes, or any platform — from one dashboard.

Kowabunga does not rebuild agent runtimes. Hosted agents are real OpenClaw instances running on managed infrastructure. You get full feature parity — cron, heartbeat, hooks, skills, browser, voice — everything.

Architecture

Kowabunga consists of three layers: a frontend dashboard (Vercel), managed agent hosting (Railway), and billing (Stripe). The key insight is that hosted agents ARE OpenClaw agents — we wrap the runtime, not rebuild it.

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  Vercel                                      │
│  Next.js frontend + API routes               │
│  Postgres (users, items, billing)             │
│  KV cache (sessions, state)                  │
│  Cron (sync agent status every 5 min)        │
├──────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  Railway                                     │
│  Managed OpenClaw containers (per Pro user)  │
│  Full capabilities: cron, heartbeat, hooks,  │
│  browser, skills, multi-channel, voice       │
├──────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  Stripe                                      │
│  Pro $20/mo · Team $50/mo · Seat $15/mo      │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Quickstart

1. Create an account

2. Connect your model keys

Go to Account → Models and add your API keys. Kowabunga supports Claude (Anthropic), GPT (OpenAI), and Gemini (Google). Your keys, your costs — we never touch your AI bill.

3. Import or create agents

Three options:

Import — paste a gateway URL from OpenClaw, Hermes, or any platform
Marketplace — browse and add pre-built agents, skills, and workflows
Create — describe what you want in natural language and Kowabunga builds the spec

4. Choose where to run

When adding an agent, you pick where it runs:

Option	What Happens	Tier
Host on Kowabunga	We spin up a managed OpenClaw instance on our infrastructure. Zero setup.	PRO
Run on OpenClaw	Agent runs on your OpenClaw instance. Kowabunga monitors via gateway URL.	FREE
Run on Hermes	Agent runs on your Hermes Agent instance. Same monitoring.	FREE
Other / Self-hosted	Any agent with an HTTP endpoint. Kowabunga tracks it in your dashboard.	FREE

Agents

Agents are autonomous AI processes that run continuously. They monitor conditions, react to events, and take actions on your behalf. Examples: market scanners, news monitors, whale trackers.

Agents can use cron schedules, heartbeat polling, event hooks, and any installed skills. When hosted on Kowabunga, they run as full OpenClaw agents with complete capability access.

Skills

Skills are reusable capabilities that agents use. They come in four sub-types:

Data — feeds and APIs (Binance, Yahoo Finance, Reuters, Etherscan)
Wallet — crypto wallet connections (MetaMask, Phantom, Ledger)
Capability — tools and analysis (PDF Analyzer, Chart Patterns)
Integration — external platforms (Schwab, Coinbase, Discord Bridge)

Skills are installed from the marketplace. They follow the agentskills.io open standard, making them portable across OpenClaw and Hermes.

Tasks

Tasks are one-shot jobs that complete. They have a progress bar and finish when done. Examples: research reports, earnings briefs, deep dives. Tasks consume your monthly task allocation on Pro/Team.

Workflows

Workflows chain agents, skills, and tasks into multi-step pipelines. Create them visually with the graph editor or describe what you want in natural language.

News Sentinel → Market Scanner → Claude Analysis → Telegram Alert

Each step passes its output to the next. Workflows can be triggered manually, on a schedule (cron), or by conditions.

Importing Agents

Import agents from any platform that exposes a gateway or API endpoint. The import modal supports three explicit sources plus a generic option:

OpenClaw

Paste your OpenClaw gateway URL (typically http://your-server:18789). Kowabunga queries the gateway for agent status, logs, and configuration. Full two-way management — start, stop, configure from the dashboard.

Gateway URL: http://192.168.1.100:18789
# or for cloud deployments:
Gateway URL: https://my-openclaw.railway.app

Hermes Agent

Hermes Agent by Nous Research uses the same agentskills.io standard as OpenClaw. Import by pasting your Hermes gateway URL. Kowabunga provides the visual dashboard that Hermes doesn't have natively.

Gateway URL: http://your-server:port
# Hermes has no built-in GUI — Kowabunga fills that gap

Other Platforms

Any agent framework with an HTTP API or gateway can be imported. Kowabunga will poll the endpoint for status and display it in your dashboard. Depth of integration depends on what the API exposes.

Messaging Channels

Connect agents to messaging platforms for two-way communication. Supported channels:

Telegram — most popular, full bot API support
Discord — webhook + bot support, rich embeds
Slack — workspace integration
WhatsApp — via OpenClaw/Hermes gateway
iMessage — requires macOS host (reads Messages.app database, sends via AppleScript). Works for self-hosted agents on Mac. Not available for Kowabunga-hosted agents (Railway runs Linux).
SMS — via gateway

Channels can be configured system-wide (CMD VIA on the dashboard) or per-agent (expand any agent and toggle channels).

Managed Hosting

Pro and Team users can host agents directly on Kowabunga infrastructure. When you choose "Host on Kowabunga," we provision a managed OpenClaw instance running on Railway.

Hosted agents are real OpenClaw agents. They have full access to cron, heartbeat, hooks, browser automation, skills, and multi-channel messaging. No capability gaps.

Plan	Hosted Agents	Tasks/mo	Workflows	Price
Free	0	0	0	$0
Pro	5	15	3	$20/mo
Team (3 seats)	20	Unlimited	Unlimited	$50/mo
+Seat	+5	—	—	+$15/mo

All tiers: you bring your own AI model keys (Claude, GPT, Gemini). API inference costs are billed by your provider, not by Kowabunga.

Self-Hosted

Free tier users run agents on their own infrastructure and use Kowabunga as a dashboard. No agent limit, no cost from us. You just need:

An OpenClaw or Hermes instance running somewhere (VPS, local machine, cloud)
The gateway URL accessible from the internet (or a tunnel like ngrok/Cloudflare Tunnel)
Paste the URL into Kowabunga's import flow

Model Keys

Kowabunga stores your API keys encrypted (AES-256). Keys are passed to your managed OpenClaw instance as environment variables and never logged or transmitted elsewhere.

Supported providers:

Anthropic — Claude Sonnet 4, Claude Opus 4, Claude Haiku 4
OpenAI — GPT-4o, GPT-4o mini, o3
Google — Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini 2.5 Flash

Agents API

All agent management is available via REST API. Authentication via session token.

# Import an agent
POST /api/openclaw/import
{
  "name": "My Agent",
  "type": "agent",
  "source": "openclaw",
  "gatewayUrl": "http://my-server:18789"
}

# Provision managed hosting
POST /api/openclaw/provision
{
  "userId": "123",
  "modelProvider": "claude",
  "modelName": "claude-sonnet-4-20250514"
}

# Create via AI
POST /api/agents/create
{
  "description": "Monitor ETH whales over $10M",
  "type": "agent"
}

Billing

Billing is handled via Stripe. Upgrade/downgrade from Account → Billing in the dashboard. On upgrade, a managed OpenClaw instance is automatically provisioned. On cancellation, the instance is torn down and agents are paused (not deleted — you can re-activate by upgrading again).

# Check usage
GET /api/billing/usage
→ { agents: 3, limit: 5, tasks: 8, taskLimit: 15 }

# Create checkout session
POST /api/billing/checkout
{ "plan": "pro" }
→ { url: "https://checkout.stripe.com/..." }