$18.75 overnight to ask “Is it daytime yet?” — The absurd economics of OpenClaw’s token use

[Redaktion]

Despite several name changes, OpenClaw remains one of the most hyped AI tools. After all, it turns a PC into a fully autonomous AI agent. However, the tool can easily burn through hundreds of dollars in API tokens per day. Even worse, serious security flaws have been discovered.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/18-75-overnight-to-ask-Is-it-daytime-yet-The-absurd-economics-of-OpenClaw-s-token-use.1219925.0.html

[liheblog]

Indeed, within just one day of installing Openclaw, I nearly exhausted my entire free Groq token quota. It turned out that the Openclaw heartbeat feature runs every 30 minutes by default.
However, I subsequently discovered the following methods to address this: 1. Temporarily disabling it via CLI commands. 2. Modifying the openclaw.json or config.yaml configuration files by setting heartbeat.every to 0m, thereby disabling heartbeat checks. 3. Implementing optimized alternatives—specifically, reducing the frequency, restricting the active time window, or utilizing lower-cost models.