Run Qwen Code on its own isolated micro-VM with a persistent workspace, and message it from Telegram or Slack. Setup, keys, cost and limits.
The one to host if you are running Qwen or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint — including a self-hosted or regional provider that the other harnesses will not talk to.
All 9 hosted coding agents share the same shape — a full agent with files, a shell and git, running in its own Firecracker micro-VM with a persistent workspace, reachable from Telegram and the other channels listed above. If you have not settled on one yet, the side-by-side comparison is the faster read.
A key. A Qwen or OpenAI-compatible API key and, if you are not using Alibaba's endpoint, the base URL of the provider you want.
That is genuinely the whole list. There is no server to provision, no Docker to install, and no reverse proxy to configure — the point of hosting it here is that the micro-VM, the volume and the channel bridge already exist.
"OpenAI-compatible" is a spectrum. Endpoints differ on tool calling and streaming, so smoke-test a real tool-using task through the web chat before you wire it to Telegram.
Two separate bills, and only one of them is predictable. Hosting is $9 a month for the Standard box (1 vCPU / 1 GB), fixed, and the first agent month is free. Model tokens are forwarded at provider cost with no markup, so that half depends entirely on how much you use it.
The variable half is where always-on agents surprise people, and it is worth reading the cost breakdown before you point a coding agent at a long-running task. A coding agent that gets stuck in a retry loop is the single most expensive failure mode on this platform, which is why cost per conversation is on the Billing tab rather than buried in an invoice at the end of the month.
The workspace lives on a persistent volume, so files survive restarts and idle stops. If you want the agent's output somewhere other than the VM, give it a git remote it can push to — that is the difference between an agent whose work you can use and one whose work you have to copy out of a chat window by hand.
Not sure? Describe the job rather than the runtime — the builder's solutions engineer reads the same capability matrix this page does and will argue for a different one if it fits better.
This opens the builder with a starting brief already written. Change any of it before you send — first agent month is free.
Start with this brief →