Your OpenClaw API Bill Is Probably 3x What It Should Be. Here Is How I Fixed Mine.

Last January my OpenClaw API bill hit €140. In one month. For one agent doing morning reports and CRM updates. I almost quit the whole thing. If you are reading threads about cutting OpenClaw costs, you have probably seen the standard advice: switch to Haiku, use Ollama, set up model routing, enable prompt caching, prune your session history. All of this works. I tried all of it. My bill dropped to about €50/month. Then I tried something different and it dropped to €49/month flat. For everything. Forever. The Standard Cost Optimisation Playbook (And Why It Is Exhausting) Here is what every guide tells you: 1. Model routing — send simple tasks to cheap models, complex tasks to expensive ones. This works but requires you to define what "simple" and "complex" mean for YOUR use case, configure the routing rules, test them, and maintain them as models change. 2. Prompt caching — reuse cached context to avoid resending the same system prompt tokens. Saves 80-90% on input tokens whe