How I Built a Cost Proxy to Stop OpenClaw from Burning My API Budget

If you've been in the OpenClaw community for more than a week, you've seen the posts. "$3,600/month on API calls." "Woke up to a $200 bill from a heartbeat loop running all night." "I have zero visibility into what my agent is spending." OpenClaw is one of the most exciting open-source projects of 2026 — 210K+ GitHub stars, a personal AI agent that actually does things. But the moment you give an AI agent unrestricted access to paid APIs, you're playing with fire. I kept seeing these horror stories and realized nobody had built a proper solution. There are a few monitoring tools out there (ClawMetry gives you read-only stats, Tokscale is CLI-only), but nothing that actually stops the bleeding in real time. So I built TokPinch. What TokPinch Does TokPinch is a transparent proxy that sits between OpenClaw and your LLM provider (Anthropic, OpenAI). Every API request passes through it. Setup is literally one line in your OpenClaw config: ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL = http://localhost:4100/v1 That's