Show HN: DenchClaw – Local CRM on Top of OpenClaw (github.com)

123 points by kumar_abhirup 21 hours ago

Hi everyone, I am Kumar, co-founder of Dench (https://denchclaw.com). We were part of YC S24, an agentic workflow company that previously worked with sales floors automating niche enterprise tasks such as outbound calling, legal intake, etc.

Building consumer / power-user software always gave me more joy than FDEing into an enterprise. It did not give me joy to manually add AI tools to a cloud harness for every small new thing, at least not as much as completely local software that is open source and has all the powers of OpenClaw (I can now talk to my CRM on Telegram!).

A week ago, we launched Ironclaw, an Open Source OpenClaw CRM Framework (https://x.com/garrytan/status/2023518514120937672?s=20) but people confused us with NearAI’s Ironclaw, so we changed our name to DenchClaw (https://denchclaw.com).

OpenClaw today feels like early React: the primitive is incredibly powerful, but the patterns are still forming, and everyone is piecing together their own way to actually use it. What made React explode was the emergence of frameworks like Gatsby and Next.js that turned raw capability into something opinionated, repeatable, and easy to adopt.

That is how we think about DenchClaw. We are trying to make it one of the clearest, most practical, and most complete ways to use OpenClaw in the real world.

Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfACTbc3Bh4#t=43

  npx denchclaw
I use DenchClaw daily for almost everything I do. It also works as a coding agent like Cursor - DenchClaw built DenchClaw. I am addicted now that I can ask it, “hey in the companies table only show me the ones who have more than 5 employees” and it updates it live than me having to manually add a filter.

On Dench, everything sits in a file system, the table filters, views, column toggles, calendar/gantt views, etc, so OpenClaw can directly work with it using Dench’s CRM skill.

The CRM is built on top of DuckDB, the smallest, most performant and at the same time also feature rich database we could find. Thank you DuckDB team!

It creates a new OpenClaw profile called “dench”, and opens a new OpenClaw Gateway… that means you can run all your usual openclaw commands by just prefixing every command with `openclaw --profile dench` . It will start your gateway on port 19001 range. You will be able to access the DenchClaw frontend at localhost:3100. Once you open it on Safari, just add it to your Dock to use it as a PWA.

Think of it as Cursor for your Mac (also works on Linux and Windows) which is based on OpenClaw. DenchClaw has a file tree view for you to use it as an elevated finder tool to do anything on your mac. I use it to create slides, do linkedin outreach using MY browser.

DenchClaw finds your Chrome Profile and copies it fully into its own, so you won’t have to log in into all your websites again. DenchClaw sees what you see, does what you do. It’s an everything app, that sits locally on your mac.

Just ask it “hey import my notion”, “hey import everything from my hubspot”, and it will literally go into your browser, export all objects and documents and put it in its own workspace that you can use.

We would love you all to break it, stress test its CRM capabilities, how it streams subagents for lead enrichment, hook it into your Apollo, Gmail, Notion and everything there is. Looking forward to comments/feedback!

themanmaran 18 hours ago

In terms of "[XYZ] for agents", I think CRM is a big one that people haven't talked about as much. It becomes super relevant as soon as people start using an agent for anything customer related.

And the design principals are already pretty well established (accounts, contacts, leads, opportunities, custom object model, stages, etc.). It just needs to be turned into a database boilerplate with a bunch of agent tools. Excited to try this out.

kumar_abhirup 18 hours ago

Thank you, I'll be here for everyone to try it out, let me know how it goes!

llmslave 18 hours ago

Eventually there will just database tables, some skill files, and an agent

kumar_abhirup 16 hours ago

Everything is skills. In a file system. That is the future.

Responding to some HN comments, I understand the focus on Sales Automation and Outreach can be worrysome.

But for me personally, this is where I do all knowledge work. For me it acts like Cursor, Happenstance, News Aggregator, Fun games creator like Pacman (it has an App Store), I can import Notion into editable MD files, create reports and presentations, etc.

mickael-kerjean 9 hours ago

That's exactly the direction I took with Filestash (https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash) where everything is treated as a filesystem with fine-grained control to handle authorisation, plus a virtual filesystem layer to create completely new filesystems that don't 1 to 1 map to reality.

cpard 7 hours ago

I get the value of a personal CRM and potential power of having one locally managed by LLMs and I'd love to see such a solution, because to your point, outreach is just a small part of what you can do with a personal CRM. But, the way you describe and deliver this project is very confusing to me, it's a CRM but also Cursor for your Mac (what does that even mean?), I already run Cursor on my Mac, it also has a file tree view to use it as a better MacOS find I guess?

I think that a much cleaner messaging on what this tool is for would help.

Also a question about the implementation, why DuckDB for a CRM?

Something like SQLite feels like a much natural fit for a CRM where you primarily create, update and maybe delete records and you really care for the integrity of the data model.

From a quick look on the data model, everything seems to be a VARCHAR, if this is the case, why not just store everything in the file system instead? You do that with the md files and whatever is getting extracted from the SaaS tools.

bhasinanant 4 minutes ago

I'm definitely biased here, but the OpenClaw hype is making people disregard the economics of it all. Building Auto-CRM.com, my primary concern was building a system that runs well while not costing 200$ per month to keep up, and of course, while also maintaining security. I assume the good guys at Folk, Pipedrive, etc also had similarly priorities. A lot of good work is being done within the OpenClaw ecosystem regarding RAG and memory, but specialised orchestration process to be a more reliable system.

AykutSek 16 hours ago

Watched the demo — the outreach pipeline is impressive technically, but you mentioned midway that the drafted emails came out "kind of robotic" and needed manual editing. If a human still reviews and rewrites each one, where does the actual time saving land — in the data gathering, or somewhere else?

devonkelley 7 hours ago

This is the right question and honestly the answer for most agent tools right now is "data gathering and context assembly, not generation." The drafting part gets all the demos but the real time save is the agent pulling the right info from 5 different sources before a human writes anything. Generation quality will catch up but the integration plumbing is where the value already exists today.

kumar_abhirup 16 hours ago

Data gathering / creating / updating / filtering / creating reports, Doing certain action on every data entry (like sending email), etc.

Telling DenchClaw to "make it less robotic" on 300+ personalised drafts is still better than me actually making it less robotic myself imo

maCDzP 15 hours ago

I really want a DeathClaw product.

dr_kiszonka 6 hours ago

There is a Dungeon Clawer.

antonio-mello 7 hours ago

The "early React" analogy resonates. I've been seeing the same pattern with MCP (Model Context Protocol) — the primitive is powerful (AI assistants calling tools via a standard protocol), but most implementations are still gluing things together ad-hoc. There's a gap between "I can build an MCP server" and "this is a polished, opinionated product."

The DuckDB choice is smart for local-first. I use ClickHouse for production analytics and the difference in operational complexity is night and day — DuckDB just works for single-node use cases without any infrastructure overhead.

Curious about the Chrome profile cloning approach. That's clever for importing auth state, but does it create any issues with cookie/session conflicts if both profiles try to access the same service simultaneously?

kumar_abhirup 7 hours ago

As of March 9 2026, it does log you out of your Google once on the main profile, but once you log back in everything works perfectly fine.

spiderfarmer 17 hours ago

At what point does this become an AI powered spamming machine?

jscottmiller 17 hours ago

Become? I believe that’s the point.

operatingthetan 17 hours ago

Cold calling is not 'spam' because it is essentially done by a human. This is no different than an email spam network. So now this will just become email / linkedin spam done by corporations? I guess we turn up the filters now?

richwater 16 hours ago

observationist 17 hours ago

[astronaut with gun meme] Neal Stephenson depicts this outcome in his novels as "The Miasma" and introduces a zero knowledge biometric based cryptography scheme used by everyone to validate content, and everyone has to have advanced AI filters in order to pluck out tiny tidbits of signal from among the noise.

We're going to need local AI to sift through the trash. Platforms have been more or less useless at curating content, and it's only smaller sites like HN that have retained a high SNR at this point. It doesn't even matter what media, at this point, video has passed the 2-3 second sniff test. We're seeing boomers get completely sniped by AI videos, even with watermark, showing absurd spin on current events. Text, music, podcasts, video, cartoons, whatever, it's all been infested, and the quality keeps increasing. I've seen a couple 2+ minute seedance productions that have been actually enjoyable, but by June that sort of thing will be one-shot prompting instead of someone gluing together the outputs from 4 difference SoTA AI tools.

It's getting weird, and we're not ready for it, at all.

kumar_abhirup 16 hours ago

I get why it looks that way from the CRM angle, but outreach is maybe 5% of what I actually use DenchClaw for day to day.

Yesterday I asked it to pull up all my meeting notes from last week, cross-reference them with my task list, and draft follow-ups. Before that I had it reorganize a messy folder of research PDFs into a structured workspace. I use it to build slides, write code (DenchClaw literally built DenchClaw), manage my calendar, search through old Notion pages I forgot existed.

The CRM part gets attention because that's what people asked for when we talked to power users. But the actual product is just "OpenClaw with a good UI, a file system, and DuckDB, running locally on your Mac." It does whatever you'd normally do on your computer. The browser is yours, the files are yours, the data never leaves your machine.

Think of it less as a sales tool and more as what happens when your entire Mac becomes programmable through natural language. The CRM is one app that runs on top of that. People are already using it for project management, research, personal knowledge bases, all kinds of stuff we didn't plan for.

john_strinlai 13 hours ago

>but outreach is maybe 5% of what I actually use DenchClaw for day to day.

will you be enforcing the same for the users of your product?

if not, i am not sure how this statement addresses the above concerns.

kumareth 5 hours ago

yunohn 7 hours ago

Truly tired of seeing yet-another spam machine. All of these hype machines are built to spam people about their /paid/ hype product, rinse-repeat. BS

dandaka 18 hours ago

Can my agents (powered by NanoClaw or Claude Code) use the CRM without installing OpenClaw codebase?

kumar_abhirup 18 hours ago

This is an OpenClaw framework, so it installs / relies on your existing OpenClaw codebase. I think there has been a ton of requests on Claude Code support, someone has been working on a PR for exactly this, I'll update you here if it ships.

imiric 16 hours ago

Well, of course I will test this thing you built in 2 days[1] for you!

[1]: https://xcancel.com/kumareth/status/2023534527113818625

davexunit 17 hours ago

Combining OpenClaw with sensitive personal data is a recipe for disaster.

dickiedyce 17 hours ago

... or disastrous comedy?

crowcroft 15 hours ago

Not a biggie, but might want to update the reference to 'Ironclaw' in the Try Ironclaw link at the top of dench.com

kumar_abhirup 15 hours ago

Oh yea

Lalabadie 15 hours ago

Looking at that star graph: Since OpenClaw became a thing, I can't help but conclude that Github interest/popularity metrics have become useless signals.

jesse_dot_id 15 hours ago

Especially considering this project is 2 days old and has 580 stars. 500 seems like it would be a nice round number if one were to purchase bot engagement. Not confident enough to make that claim directly, but something about this project doesn't sit right in general.

kumar_abhirup 15 hours ago

Bruh it's not botted, the 500 stars came from Garry Tan's viral tweet.

jesse_dot_id 13 hours ago

BoredPositron 14 hours ago

articsputnik 17 hours ago

I just use plain-text files for my CRM in Obsidian [1]. Works great if you are a solo founder only.

[1] https://www.ssp.sh/brain/managing-my-business-with-obsidian/

zikani_03 16 hours ago

Nice, this seems interesting. I don't use Obsidian (I use Logseq) but this has given me a couple of ideas for a CRM I am building (it's currently in a Personal Relationship manager phase which I've found useful for about a year or two).

Thanks for sharing.

kumar_abhirup 16 hours ago

Love this setup! I also use Obsidian, but after DenchClaw I usually just open my Obsidian directory into DenchClaw so I can do anything with it. It has all the needed primitives for me like the markdown editor, graphs, etc.

jadbox 17 hours ago

That's a simple but useful set up, thanks for sharing.

theturtletalks 14 hours ago

Seems interesting, but I see it's a fork of Openclaw that's many commits behind. Do you think you'll be able to keep DenchClaw updated with Openclaw?

I think a better solution would be to bring in one of the many Openclaw alternatives like NullClaw, ZeroClaw, etc. The magic of Openclaw is the heartbeat and cron modules so bringing in that piece should not be too difficult? I'll fork and hack away at it as well but the less dependent you are on other projects, the longer the longevity.

kumar_abhirup 13 hours ago

We started a direct OpenClaw fork, but we didn't want to always push upstream updates manually. So now we are completely detached from it. The GitHub says its a fork because it was originally forked, but now we have completely separated ourselves from it.

Now instead of bundling and patching from inside it, we just ship alongside OpenClaw so you can use the latest OpenClaw CLI separately yourself.

jesse_dot_id 16 hours ago

OpenClaw opens a wide attack surface on your digital life that cannot be remediated so long as hallucinations and prompt injection remain unsolved problems. Anything built on top of it is equally insecure and probably even more insecure.

I really don't want to yuck anybody's yums or step on dev work that I had nothing to do with, because I've been there and I know it sucks, but OpenClaw is barely secure enough to even play with in a sandbox. Giving it private information about your real business and real business contacts feels like an absolutely insane thing to do.

At best OpenClaw is like a toy... if the toy was a gun and it shot real bullets. This feels like playing Russian roulette with your livelihood.

monster_truck 11 hours ago

I cannot fucking believe people are letting it remote start their cars and control their garage door. Nevermind ovens. All things people have done and posted about.

As someone that has worked in the automotive space, an enormous amount of regulation and effort is spent making sure you cannot do something like forgetfully remote start the car with your garage door closed and gas yourself. Nevermind securing it so that others cannot do this to you.

And these people are plugging it into ... this, which will happily go "oh, the car turned off after 15 minutes, let me turn it back on!"

There are realistic odds that someone is rotting in their house while their lobster pays the bills and writes blog posts for them.

conqrr 12 hours ago

This rings so true. Software Engineering should have stricter bar similar to med professionals. If we have leaked such lousy products and the public crowd thinks this is usable, it's a failure of the industry as a whole.

skeeter2020 12 hours ago

>> Software Engineering should have stricter bar similar to med professionals.

This is a month-old project by someone how has been suckling at the YC teat of release as early as possible; #YOLO. There's no "engineering" here.

lnrd 12 hours ago

I like the idea of OpenClaw a lot, it's a technology that I would want in my life. But in it's current form it's kinda chilling and I cannot see it become safe to use anytime soon.

It seems to me many infosec best practices that have been built over decades have been forgot in the last few months like nothing happened. People really do give this kind of software full system access, plus access to their emails, their private chats, most likely their passwords too and who knows what else via plugins. I couldn't really imagine this happening one year ago.

I'm 100% confident that any state actor and cybercrime groups are currently heavily focusing their research on these tools. You compromise the right person and you can access all kind of critical information, it would basically be the same as having some remote control software on their system with full permissions.

And everyone on the hype train seems to be absolutely unaware of this. Maybe I'm missing something, but all of this feels so odd to me.

jesse_dot_id 10 hours ago

I think a lot of them are aware of it, but also grifters, and hoping to profit off of it before the bomb goes off so that they can claim ignorance and escape blame. New and powerful thing that people don't fully understand becomes fertile ground for grifters to sew their sins. Like when Marie Curie discovered radium and everyone and their mother started forcing it into products, including toothpaste and "medicine", within like 5-10 years.

zipping1549 12 hours ago

> so long as hallucinations and prompt injection remain unsolved problems

Aren't hallucinations mathematically impossible to be _solved_? Cannot believe how so many people just willy nilly give everything they have to a lying parrot.

strongpigeon 17 hours ago

One on hand, this is genuinely cool. On the other end, this is the final nail in cold outreach's coffin.

kumar_abhirup 16 hours ago

Ha, I get why it looks that way from the CRM angle, but outreach is maybe 5% of what I actually use DenchClaw for day to day.

Yesterday I asked it to pull up all my meeting notes from last week, cross-reference them with my task list, and draft follow-ups. Before that I had it reorganize a messy folder of research PDFs into a structured workspace. I use it to build slides, write code (DenchClaw literally built DenchClaw), manage my calendar, search through old Notion pages I forgot existed.

The CRM part gets attention because that's what people asked for when we talked to power users. But the actual product is just "OpenClaw with a good UI, a file system, and DuckDB, running locally on your Mac." It does whatever you'd normally do on your computer. The browser is yours, the files are yours, the data never leaves your machine.

Think of it less as a sales tool and more as what happens when your entire Mac becomes programmable through natural language. The CRM is one app that runs on top of that. People are already using it for project management, research, personal knowledge bases, all kinds of stuff we didn't plan for.

himmi-01 10 hours ago

I think this explanation is much easier to grasp :). And simpler to introduce to people, as many of the tech people still prefer better UX.

dncornholio 35 minutes ago

paroneayea 17 hours ago

Wow, sorry, but given how incredibly insecure all the "claw" agent type things are right now, does this really sound wise at all?

It sees everything you do, really? What's it gonna do with that data? You don't know.

Put all your customer data in there, all your customer relationships. It's fine, it couldn't leak all that information, it couldn't screw up any sensitive business details I'm sure. This is gonna go great.

Sorry AFK everybody I'm gonna go get myself a VibeMBA.

Anyway, good luck, I'm really looking forward to the user stories in a few weeks! I'm sure this won't go badly at all.

paroneayea 17 hours ago

> DenchClaw finds your Chrome Profile and copies it fully into its own, so you won’t have to log in into all your websites again. DenchClaw sees what you see, does what you do. It’s an everything app, that sits locally on your mac.

Wow that sounds great. Hey don't worry these things never blackmail anyone. Let it know if you're gonna turn it off, I bet it'll make some REAL interesting choices based on your browsing history

lexicality 17 hours ago

I'm always confused by this kind of comment about AI accessing people's chrome history because it seems to imply that the kind of person who uses this tool is both too stupid to know what private browsing is and also is into absolutely heinous stuff.

I feel like the average person is going to be like "oh no it'd be terrible if everyone found out I really like the 'big boobs' category on pornhub"

DamonHD 17 hours ago

holsta 16 hours ago

zer00eyz 16 hours ago

> It has a CRM focus because we asked a couple dozen hard-core OpenClaw users "what do you actually do", and it was sales automation, lead enrichment, biz dev, creating slides, linkedin outreach, email/notion/calendar stuff, and it's always painful to set up.

So basic automation and forcing the web to be "open"...

No one is talking about how AI is going to destroy business models that are dependent on dark patterns, on walled gardens, on poorly designed one size fits all implementations (so many things wedged sideways into sales force).

cootsnuck 16 hours ago

Yea, it has been a little shocking to me that the rising narratives around "AI agents everywhere" and "enable the web for AI agents" requires what we've all been wanting for awhile on the web (openness and interoperability) but that the same big players in tech have been clearly against for a long time. Like the fact that Google recently released that Google Workspace CLI (https://github.com/googleworkspace/cli) is a perfect example.

They could've released something like that years ago (the discovery service it's built on has existed for over a decade) but creating a simple, accessible, unified CLI for general integration apparently wasn't worth it until agents became the hot thing.

I wonder when / if there will be a rug pull on all of this. Because I really don't see what the long-term incentives are for incumbent tech platforms to make it easy for automated systems to essentially pull users away from the actual platform. I guess they're focused on the short term incentives. And once they decide the party's over, promising upstarts and competition can get absorbed and it'll be business as usual. Idk, we'll see.

fnord77 6 hours ago

Are people using bottomless VC money to fund the API calls for these *Claw things?

I first tried OpenClaw with a local model, it gave poor performance. Then I tried it with Claude - great but it blew through hundreds of dollars in tokens in about an hour.

Or is everybody a billionaire now?

waterproof 5 hours ago

Lots of folks use the Claude Max 20x $200/mo. tier, I think. Gets you waaay farther than $200 of API credits.

ancientcap 15 hours ago

the crm isnt the hard part, the hard part is that most sales teams have a workflow problem disguised as a tooling problem. local first is smart but id focus on opinionated defaults for pipeline stages because thats where 90% of founders building their own crm get stuck, they model their process wrong then blame the software.

SLWW 14 hours ago

> created 17 minutes ago

Is this a bot lol, use words not buzzwords

tuesdaynight 13 hours ago

Are small local models good enough for driving OpenClaw-likes or an API key from one of the big labs is needed?

ohthehugemanate 9 hours ago

Depends on what you're using it for I suppose. A common tactic with Openclaw itself is to have a cheap or local model as the default, with rules to "escalate" to other models based on task complexity/type. But if every cron job comes with complete access to your personal machine and browser profile... Yeah, better go for the most predictable model you can find.

kumar_abhirup 12 hours ago

I always recommend Claude Opus 4.6 for anything OpenClaw gets its hands on.

tuesdaynight 12 hours ago

I was hopeful that small models would be enough for the majority of the tasks, but I understand that it's not the case yet. But thanks for answering

mstank 16 hours ago

Am I the only one that read this as "DeathClaw"?

operatingthetan 16 hours ago

Sounds like a great name for a chaos-fork for Openclaw.

_pdp_ 14 hours ago

I find it amusing that one of the main things to do with OpenClaw and other similar tools is create a Web Interface on top of it so that users can click on buttons when the entire promise of the technology is that you don't have to do any of that because it transcends standard UI.

I mean, ultimately why would you even need a CRM if not to sell something? And if you are going to sell something ultimately you want to get that done without any additional layers of abstraction. So the interface is the definition of the goal and the output is measured in results.

"Hey claw, I want to sell my product. Go figure it out!"

You don't need a UI for that.

Traubenfuchs 13 hours ago

To make this easier we could develop some kind of… query or… command language for this.

Take OPs example…

> I am addicted now that I can ask it, “hey in the companies table only show me the ones who have more than 5 employees”

Now how could that command language look like, maybe something like…

PICK * of COMPANIES if EMPLOYEE_COUNT >10;

We could call this DCCL: Dench Claw Command Language!

_pdp_ 11 hours ago

It is called SQL and the tool is called sqlite.

mattnewton 11 hours ago

falloon 12 hours ago

Readme has a discord link claiming 25K online, might want to update that it's quite misleading.

kumar_abhirup 12 hours ago

Sorry, it happened because it was originally an OpenClaw fork.

ftkftk 17 hours ago

In response maybe we should design TCPAclaw. It is specialized in honeypotting all of the random cold call spam, tracks down the source of unsolicited contacts; including registration state, legal contacts, and registered agent(s). It then drafts and sends a TCPA letter and waits for one of two things to happen: Either a $500-$1500 check arriving in your mailbox, or the demand deadline elapses. In case of demand deadline elapse, TCPAclaw files a small claims suit in the appropriate court of jurisdiction.

Fight fire with fire.

jadbox 17 hours ago

That's... not a bad idea. The downside is the bot would be doing a lot of these and false-positives would be... embarrassing (like a real investor outreach).

dickiedyce 17 hours ago

I'm in.

bluepeter 18 hours ago

> sales automation, lead enrichment, biz dev, [...] linkedin outreach,

Sigh.

kumar_abhirup 18 hours ago

It also does all or most knowledge work there is, the goal is for it to be smartly be able to do anything you ever do on your machine.

dang 16 hours ago

I've taken that bit out of the text above. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47314105 for more.

shafyy 17 hours ago

> It has a CRM focus because we asked a couple dozen hard-core OpenClaw users "what do you actually do", and it was sales automation, lead enrichment, biz dev, creating slides, linkedin outreach, email/notion/calendar stuff, and it's always painful to set up.

Fuck me, it's going to get worse before it gets better, isn't it?

dang 16 hours ago

I've taken that bit out of the text above - I originally advised Kumar to put it in there (it's actually from the opening of the demo video), but in hindsight, I should have known it would backfire with the HN audience.

ftkftk 17 hours ago

100% :-/

olq_plo 15 hours ago

Great, thanks for making me Google what CRM means in this context. Neither your post nor your website explains the acronym.

zachrip 15 hours ago

This is a pretty widely known acronym

Aurornis 13 hours ago

Customer Relationship Management.

Broad term for tools used to manage interactions with existing customers and/or sales prospects.

kumar_abhirup 15 hours ago

Sorry! It's basically a database for normies.