This sounds awesome and exactly like the easy and safe on-ramp to OpenClaw that I've been looking for! I want to believe.

Two questions as a potential user who knows the gist of OpenClaw but has been afraid to try it: 1. I don't understand how the two consumption credits play into the total cost of ownership. E.g. how long will $20 of Orthogonal credits last me? I have no idea what it will actually cost to use Klaus/OpenClaw for a month. 2. Batteries included sounds great, but what are those batteries? I've never heard of Apollo or Hunter.io so I don't know the value of them being included.

In general, a lot of your copy sounds like it's written for people already deep into OpenClaw. Since you're not targeting those folks, I would steer more towards e.g. articulating use cases that work ootb and a TCO estimate for less technical folks. Good luck, and I'm eager to try it!

▲

TheDong 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The cost of ownership for an OpenClaw, and how many credits you'll use, is really hard to estimate since it depends so wildly on what you do.

I can give you an openclaw instruction that will burn over $20k worth of credits in a matter of hours.

You could also not talk to your claw at all for the entire month, setup no crons / reoccurring activities / webhooks / etc, and get a bill of under $1 for token usage.

My usage of OpenClaw ends up costing on the order of $200/mo in tokens with the claude code max plan (which you're technically not allowed to use with OpenClaw anymore), or over $2000 if I were using API credits I think (which Klause is I believe, based on their FAQ mentioning OpenRouter).

So yeah, what I consider fairly light and normal usage of OpenClaw can quite easily hit $2000/mo, but it's also very possible to hit only $5/mo.

Most of my tokens are eaten up by having it write small pieces of code, and doing a good amount of web browser orchestration. I've had 2 sentence prompts that result in it spinning up subagents to browse and summarize thousands of webpages, which really eats a lot of tokens.

I've also given my OpenClaw access to its own AWS account, and it's capable of spinning up lambdas, ec2 instances, writing to s3, etc, and so it also right now has an AWS bill of around $100/mo (which I only expect to go up).

I haven't given it access to my credit card directly yet, so it hasn't managed to buy gift cards for any of the friendly nigerian princes that email it to chat, but I assume that's only a matter of time.

▲

grim_io 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Absolute madman :)

Giving an agent access to AWS is effectively giving it your credit card.

At the max, I would give it ssh access to a Hetzner VM with its own user, capable of running rootles podman containers.

▲

haolez 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Not at all. AWS IAM policy is a complex maze, but incredibly powerful. It solves this exact problem very well.

	▲	wiether 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Do you honestly believe that they made the effort of setting the appropriate roles and policies, though?

▲

jimbob45 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Would having a locally-hosted model offset any of these costs?

	▲	kennywinker 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yes, but that comes at the cost of using a dumber llm. The state of the art ones are only available via commercial api, and the best self-hostable models require $10,000+ gpus. This is a problem for coding as smarter really has an impact there, but there are so so so many tasks that an 8b model that runs on a $200 gpu can handle nicely. Scrape this page and dump json? Yeah that’s gonna be fine. This is my conclusion based on a week or so of using ollama + qwen3.5:3b self hosted on a ~10 year old dell optiplex with only the built-in gpu. You don’t need state of the art to do simple tasks.
	▲	robthompson2018 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Our starter plan gives you a machine with 2GB of RAM. You will not be able to run a local LLM. OpenRouter has free models (eg Z.ai: GLM 4.5 Air), I recommend those.

▲

giancarlostoro 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Just have to know... What the heck are you building?

▲

robthompson2018 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Our average user spends $50 a month all-in (tokens and subscription). If you're budget conscious you can use a cheap model (eg Gemini Flash) or even a free one. I confess I am a snob and only use Claude Opus, but even using OpenClaw all day every day I only spend about $500 a month on tokens.

Orthogonal credits are used more frequently by power users. For everyday tasks they'll last a very long time, I don't think any of our users have run out.

Some example Orthogonal user cases:

* customers in sales uses Apollo to get contact info for leads

* I use Exa search to help me prepare for calls by getting background info on customers and businesses

* I used SearchAPI to help find AirBnbs.

Point taken on the copy! We made this writing more technical for the HackerNews audience and try to use less jargon on other platforms.

▲

_joel 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Your average user spends £50 a month? How long have you been running, just wondering since OpenClaw was only released (as openclaw) a month ago.

	▲	robthompson2018 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		We have been live since Feb 7. Maybe $50 a month is an underestimate because our average user has been live for less than a month.

▲

somewhatrandom9 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You may want to also look into AWS's OpenClaw offering (I was surprised to see this): https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-openclaw-on-ama...

▲

xienze 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> safe on-ramp to OpenClaw

IMO I don't think the "OpenClaw has root access to your machine" angle is the thing you should worry that much about. You can put your OpenClaw on a VM, behind a firewall and three VPNs but if it's got your Google, AWS, GitHub, etc. credentials you've still got a lot to worry about. And honestly, I think malicious actors are much more interested in those credentials than wiping out your machine.

I'm honestly kind of surprised everyone neglects to think about that aspect and is instead more concerned with "what if it can delete my files."

	▲	necrodome 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Because no one has a reliable solution to that problem. The file deletion angle is easier to advertise. "runs in a sandbox, can't touch your system" fits on a landing page, even if it's not the more important problem.
	▲	baileywickham 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I think I agree here but for us it's more of a defense in depth thing. If you want to give it access to your email you are opening yourself up to attacks, but it doesn't have that access by default. We have an integration to give the agent it's own inbox instead of requiring access to your gmail for this reason. Similarly, if you want to only use Klaus for coding there is no risk to your personal data, even if your Klaus instance is hacked.