Where your data lives

AskNiva runs your assistant on a server that is yours alone. This page explains exactly what that means: what we host, what we can and cannot see, and how you leave if you ever want to.

Your own server, not a slice of someone else’s

Every customer gets a dedicated virtual server (hosted on Hetzner infrastructure) with OpenClaw preconfigured on it. There is no shared instance and no multi-tenant assistant: your files, your conversations and your configuration live on hardware provisioned for you alone. Higher tiers include full SSH access, because it is your server.

Your prompts never pass through us

When your assistant calls an AI model, the request goes directly from your instance to the AI provider over TLS. AskNiva’s control plane is not in that data path — we never see or log prompt content or model output.

What we can see is deliberately narrow: call counts, latency, error codes, the model identifier and token-budget usage. Enough to keep your instance healthy, nothing that reads your conversations.

API keys are encrypted

AI provider keys you add are stored using industry-standard encryption. If you prefer to keep keys out of the picture entirely, Niva Credits lets your assistant run with no API key at all, billed with your plan in rands.

Patched for you

We maintain the operating system under your instance and apply the security updates it needs. Upstream OpenClaw security releases are rolled out on a best-effort basis as the project publishes them — you don’t watch release feeds, we do.

POPIA first

AskNiva is a South African service, run by a South African company, built to POPIA’s rules. Our privacy policy says what we collect and why in plain English, and every customer gets our Data Processing Addendum — not just enterprise accounts.

No lock-in — leaving is a feature

OpenClaw is open-source software under the MIT licence. You can export your instance and self-host it anywhere, any time; AskNiva is a managed-hosting convenience, not a cage. openClaw is a third-party project — AskNiva is not affiliated with or endorsed by the openClaw project or the openClaw Foundation.

The plain-language promises above are backed by the Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and Data Processing Addendum — where anything here differs from those documents, the documents govern.