6 ms·

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

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 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
    Not at all. AWS IAM policy is a complex maze, but incredibly powerful. It solves this exact problem very well.
    - wiether 6mo ago
      Do you honestly believe that they made the effort of setting the appropriate roles and policies, though?
      - baq 6mo ago
        you tell your clanker to do it obviously
  - TheDong 6mo ago
    I am using an AWS Organization managed sub-account, so it's all pretty self-contained to that one account, and I can easily enough terminate that single sub-account. There's infamously no way to set a max bill amount for an account in AWS, so it indeed has unlimited spending, but I'm okay with a couple hundred bucks a month. > Hetzner VM with its own user, capable of running rootles podman containers Why not give it root on the full VM, and not use the VM for anything else? Giving it a user, and presumably also running your own stuff as a different user, sounds like a very weak security boundary to me compared to giving it a dedicated machine. If you're not doing multi-tenancy, there's no reason to not give it root, and if you are doing multi-tenancy, then your security boundary is worse than mine is, so you can't call me a madman for it.
- giancarlostoro 6mo ago
  Just have to know... What the heck are you building?
robthompson2018 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
    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.
- iJohnDoe 6mo ago
  Thanks for giving real-world examples of your usage. Do you think it’s worth $500 a month? Also, maybe tough to answer, does it seem like the token usage ($500 a month) would be equivalent if you did the same things using Claude or GPT directly? My reason for asking is because I tried OpenClaw and a quick one-line test question used 10,000 tokens. I immediately deleted the whole thing.
somewhatrandom9 6mo ago
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-amazon-lightsail-to-run-your-autonomous-private-ai-agents/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-openclaw-on-ama...
xienze 6mo ago
> 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 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
  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.

TheDong 6mo ago

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 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
  Not at all. AWS IAM policy is a complex maze, but incredibly powerful. It solves this exact problem very well.
  - wiether 6mo ago
    Do you honestly believe that they made the effort of setting the appropriate roles and policies, though?
    - baq 6mo ago
      you tell your clanker to do it obviously
- TheDong 6mo ago
  I am using an AWS Organization managed sub-account, so it's all pretty self-contained to that one account, and I can easily enough terminate that single sub-account. There's infamously no way to set a max bill amount for an account in AWS, so it indeed has unlimited spending, but I'm okay with a couple hundred bucks a month. > Hetzner VM with its own user, capable of running rootles podman containers Why not give it root on the full VM, and not use the VM for anything else? Giving it a user, and presumably also running your own stuff as a different user, sounds like a very weak security boundary to me compared to giving it a dedicated machine. If you're not doing multi-tenancy, there's no reason to not give it root, and if you are doing multi-tenancy, then your security boundary is worse than mine is, so you can't call me a madman for it.
giancarlostoro 6mo ago
Just have to know... What the heck are you building?

robthompson2018 6mo ago

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 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
  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.
iJohnDoe 6mo ago
Thanks for giving real-world examples of your usage. Do you think it’s worth $500 a month? Also, maybe tough to answer, does it seem like the token usage ($500 a month) would be equivalent if you did the same things using Claude or GPT directly? My reason for asking is because I tried OpenClaw and a quick one-line test question used 10,000 tokens. I immediately deleted the whole thing.

somewhatrandom9 6mo ago

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-amazon-lightsail-to-run-your-autonomous-private-ai-agents/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-openclaw-on-ama...

xienze 6mo ago

> 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 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
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.