OpenClaw itself is free. Your cost is the LLM API. Light personal use (5-10 messages/day) runs $10-30/month. Moderate use (20-50 messages/day) runs $30-80/month. Heavy business use can hit $200+/month. The exact cost depends on your model choice and conversation length.
Running a local model via Ollama (like Llama 3 or Qwen) is free after hardware costs. For cloud models, Anthropic Claude Haiku is the cheapest capable option for simple tasks. Claude Sonnet offers the best price-to-performance ratio for most use cases.
Use model routing (cheap model for simple tasks, expensive model for complex ones), enable context compaction (/compact command), set token budgets, use provider failover chains, and avoid unnecessarily long conversation contexts.
Yes, if you have the hardware. A Mac Mini M4 with 16GB RAM can run 7B-14B parameter models locally via Ollama at zero API cost. Quality is lower than Claude/GPT for complex tasks, but fine for many daily operations. See OpenAI pricing for current GPT rates.
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Related: Cost guide · Best LLM model · Cost optimization service · How much does OpenClaw cost?