Starting & stopping

When you'd want to stop your instance, how to start it back up, and what stopping actually does.

What this is

Stopping takes your agent fully offline. Channels disconnect, no messages get through, your agent won't reply to anyone. Starting brings it back up — Beach reconnects your channels automatically, and your agent is responsive again within a minute or so.

Starting and stopping are Beach operations on your hosted server — you do them from your instance page in Beach (app.beachhost.io), not from the OpenClaw Control UI.

When you'd stop it

Honestly, most people never need to. Reasons you might:

  • You want your agent fully offline for a stretch (vacation, deep-work week, privacy preference).
  • You're troubleshooting and want a clean restart.
  • A channel is misbehaving and you want everything to reconnect from scratch.

Otherwise, just leave it running.

Important: stopping does NOT save money

Your subscription is flat $44/month whether your instance is running or stopped. Stopping is a "take my agent offline" switch, not a cost-saving switch.

If you want to stop being billed, you need to cancel — see Cancelling your subscription.

Steps

To stop your instance:

  1. Open your instance page in Beach.
  2. Click the stop action.
  3. Confirm. Your instance shuts down within a minute. Channels disconnect and stop receiving messages.

To start it again:

  1. Open your instance page in Beach.
  2. Click the start action.
  3. Wait a minute or two. Beach boots your server, reconnects your channels, and your agent comes back online.

Common pitfalls

  • Channels need a moment to reconnect. When you start the instance back up, Beach handles channel reconnection automatically — but the agent may take a minute or two before it starts replying to messages again. Send a test message after a couple of minutes if you want to confirm.
  • Stopping doesn't pause billing. It's worth saying twice. If your goal is to stop paying, cancel instead.

Related