How to stop burning money on OpenClaw

OpenClaw is one of the fastest-growing open-source projects in recent history. 230,000 GitHub stars, 116,000 Discord members, 2 million visitors per week. All of that in two months. People are running personal AI agents on their Mac Minis and cloud servers. It works, and it is genuinely useful. Like any major shift in how we use technology, it comes with constraints. After speaking with over a hundred OpenClaw users, cost is the topic that comes up in almost every conversation. Someone sets up their agent, starts using it daily, and two weeks later discovers they have spent $254 on API tokens. Another spent $800 in a month. These are not power users pushing the limits. These are normal setups with normal usage. Where the money goes Your agent sends every request to your primary model. A heartbeat check, a calendar lookup, a simple web search. If your primary model is Opus 4.6, all of it goes through the most expensive endpoint available. Your costs stack up from four main sources: Syst