OpenMausBot is an open-source desktop chat app by developer Milind Soni in which every "contact" is an AI agent. Its README calls it an "open-source Grok Bot alternative", after xAI's Grok Bot, and says the project is not affiliated with xAI, Meta, OpenAI or Manus. According to a September review on the RockB blog, the first version shipped within hours of Grok Bot's beta launch on 11 August 2026. On GitHub's trending list it gained about 7,100 stars in a week and now has about 17,700 stars and 2,500 forks.
How it works: each bot has its own personality, model and connected apps, plus its own computer: a cloud Linux desktop, an isolated local virtual machine or your own machine, with a live screen preview. The bots don't come with a model bill of their own. They run on the claude, codex or grok command-line tools you already have installed and logged in. A local server on 127.0.0.1:8799 runs the agents, and transcripts and credentials stay on your machine in ~/.openmausbot. Approval cards appear before shell commands, file edits and questions. Other features include group chats and channels, switching models mid-conversation, schedules and webhook triggers, voice replies, apps such as Gmail, Slack and GitHub through Composio, an MCP server for Claude Desktop or Cursor, and a headless CLI for scripts and CI.
What the review liked: reusing subscriptions you already pay for, keeping data local, and giving each bot its own sandboxed computer. The review notes that Grok Bot comes bundled in paid plans and cites a "$120-per-month vendor bundle". OpenMausBot's core has no licence fee, but you still pay for API tokens and any cloud computers.
Limits: the README calls the project "early but real". API keys are saved in plain text in config.json. The Windows installer is not code-signed, so SmartScreen will warn you. Ubuntu 24.04 support is in beta, and host control under Wayland is off. Webhooks only work while the app is running. The cloud computer service (Boat) is paid after its trial. The core is Apache-2.0, but the enterprise/ folder has a separate source-available licence. Hacker News has barely discussed it: its biggest story there had 3 points.
