How to reduce your OpenClaw agent costs (with a free dashboard

If you're running OpenClaw agents, you're probably paying more than you realize. The problem: OpenClaw agents run continuously. Heartbeat timers fire every few minutes. Cron jobs run overnight. Subagents spawn subagents. Every one of those makes LLM API calls — and without visibility, you won't know where the money is going until the bill arrives. ## The fix: install CostClaw CostClaw is a free OpenClaw plugin that captures every LLM call and shows you a live local dashboard. Install: \ bash git clone https://github.com/Aperturesurvivor/costclaw-telemetry.git cd costclaw-telemetry npm install && npm run build openclaw plugins install -l . openclaw gateway restart \ \ Open http://localhost:3333 . ## What to look for 1. Usage by Source This is always the most revealing. Most people expect "user" to be their biggest cost. It's usually "heartbeat." If your heartbeat agent is running GPT-4o or Claude Sonnet for keep-alive checks, switch it to GPT-4o-mini or Claude Haiku. Same functionality,