Comment by rizzo94

I had a similar journey with Moltbot/OpenClaw. I spent a lot of time self-hosting and wiring things together reverse proxies, gateways, credentials, hardware decisions (Mac mini vs VPS vs mini-PC), and honestly the operational surface area gets large very quickly.

While researching ways to reduce that complexity, I came across PAIO. What stood out to me wasn’t just the convenience, but the architecture choices. The integration was basically one-click compared to the multi-step setup I had before, but the bigger win was BYOK and the privacy-first approach.

With self-hosted assistants, the tooling is powerful but the security model is often an afterthought, and it’s easy to accidentally expose something (as people in this thread pointed out with Shodan results). A managed layer that still keeps keys and data under your control feels like a reasonable middle ground between full DIY and full SaaS.

I still like self-hosting for learning and control, but for day-to-day reliability and security, having a platform that bakes in isolation and privacy primitives saves a lot of operational burden.