I Squeezed My $1k Monthly OpenClaw API Bill with ~$20/Month in AWS Credits — Here's the Exact Setup

I've got OpenClaw running locally on a Raspberry Pi — where computation power is scarce, and it's gone unresponsive on me more than a few times. But even on constrained hardware, every chat turn, every memory search, every web lookup is hitting paid APIs. The bill is small at first, then it isn't. I had been using qwen3-coder-480b for a week or two, and the daily cost skyrocketed to as much as $50. Assumption: OpenClaw is running on hardware you already own or pay for separately — a Raspberry Pi, home server, or existing cloud instance. The compute cost of the host itself isn't counted in the ~$20/month figure here. If you've picked up AWS Credits from events, the AWS Community Builder program ($500/year), or AWS Activate — or if your company prefers to keep spend within AWS rather than onboarding yet another SaaS API provider — there's a way to run the whole OpenClaw stack on credits. This is how I did it. Who This Is For Two very different reasons to care about this setup. If you hav