Just to clarify to people focusing on the $180/month price tag.

OpenClaw is not a CC-only product. You can configure it to use any API endpoint.

Paying $180/month to Anthropic is a personal choice, not a requirement to use OpenClaw.

I mean, I'm getting $180/mo worth of fun out of playing with it and figuring out what it can do that it's worth it.

Like, no one bats an eye at all the people paying $100/mo for Hulu + Live TV, or paying $350/mo for virtual pixels in candy crush / pokemon go / whatever, and I'm having at least that much fun in playing with openclaw.

I do see how a very busy businessman or a venture capitalist would gladly pay 180$/month to offload chores and mundane work from his schedule. That comes down to 6$/month, which probably matches his monthly coffee budget.

I'm surprised to read that. Here in the UK, having a live-in au pair doesn't excuse you from paying the minimum wage for all the hours that they're working (approx $2300/month for a 35 hour week). You can deduct an amount to account for the fact that you're providing accomodation but it's strictly limited (approx $400/month).

> In The Netherlands you can get a live-in au-pair from the Philippines for less than that

What a horrible situation.

We shouldn't have to "import" people from poorer countries to do the mundane tasks we got too lazy to do ourselves.

Wow. I'd expect that from Singapore or UAE but finding it happen in a fairly developed Western country is a surprise.

Surely that’s subsidized?

A lot of people in the Silicon Valley area spend that much ($6/day) on coffee. What they don’t realize is how out of touch they are in thinking makes sense for the rest of the fucking world. $180/mo is about 5% of the median US per capita income. It’s not going to pick your kids up from school, do your taxes, fix your car, or do the dishes. It’s going to download movies and call restaurants and play music. It’s a hobby, high-touch leisure assistant that costs a lot of money.

Machines don't get tired, don't have to sleep, don't face principal-agent problems and can accumulate Skill.md instructions for decades without getting replaced. I definitely see the potential of something like OpenClaw for those who can afford it.

You're paying the au pair partly in accommodation, food, bills and a visa. The visa isn't coming out of your bank account, but it's definitely part of the incentive, so you could see it as a government subsidy.

For comparison, a full time "virtual assistant" with fluent English from the Philippines costs upwards of $700/month nowadays.

How is that remotely possible without committing enormous violations of labor law?

Framed this way - then “replacing” this kind of human exploitation is definitely a good for humanity. If someone doing a job is practically a slave, then replacing them with an electron to token converter is a good thing.

The number one goal of AI should be to eliminate human exploitation. We want robots mining the minerals we use for our phones, not children. We should strive to free all of humanity from dangerous labour and the need for such jobs to exist.

If Elon Musk wants Optimus robots to help colonize Mars shouldn’t he be trying to create robots that can mine cobalt or similar minerals from dangerous mines and such?

I doubt this is true in .nl. 180 a month is low for a live-in au-pair.

> In The Netherlands you can get a live-in au-pair from the Philippines for less than that.

And you see nothing wrong with that?

Then allow me to be judgemental in your stead. I've done a similar setup as the above and completely locally. I dunno how they're paying so much, but that's ridiculously overpriced.

It's not the only thing they're doing with it. I mean, the logic is sound - $180 goes into automating bunch of manual processes in personal life, one of which is getting movies, which in some cases involves going out on the high seas.

Let's also point out the $180 is going to a hideously evil AI company which pirated millions of books and movies.

"a grand" means a thousand (dollars or pounds or whatever). $180k / month really would be a lot of money. I'd be your PA for that!

Seems like the only people using pirate bay in 2026 are "privacy obsessed" rich middle-aged guys.

I think they do it mostly to feel young and edgy.

> Not to be a narc or anything, but is OpenClaw liable to just perform illegal acts on your behalf just because it seemed like that's what you meant for it to do?

There's at least a couple of dozen instances right now, somewhere, getting very close to designing boutique chemical weapons.

If you've figured out how to pirate Anthropic's models and enough GPUs to run it for less than my API costs, I'm all ears