Feb 7, 2026 · 7 min read

7 Tricks to Cut Your OpenClaw API Costs by 80%

Opus is $15/MTok input. Haiku is $0.25. Most of your agent's work doesn't need Opus. Here's how to be smart about it.

#1 Model Tiering — The Single Biggest Win

Use expensive models (Opus, GPT-4o) only for complex reasoning. Route everything else to cheap models (Haiku at $0.25/MTok, Gemini Flash free, Groq Llama free). A simple email check doesn't need a $15/MTok brain. Set your heartbeat and email monitors to use Haiku or Gemini Flash.

#2 Sub-Agent Model Selection

When spawning sub-agents, specify the model. Research tasks → Haiku. Code builds → Sonnet. Strategy → Opus. Most users run everything on Opus and wonder why they're burning $50/day.

#3 Compaction Settings

Long conversations eat tokens. OpenClaw's compaction modes (safeguard, aggressive) summarize old context to save space. Switch to aggressive compaction if your sessions are long and you don't need perfect recall.

#4 Heartbeat Model Override

Heartbeats fire every 30 minutes. If each one uses Opus, that's 48 Opus calls per day just for checking in. Set heartbeat.model to "google/gemini-1.5-flash" (free) or "groq/llama-3.3-70b-versatile" (free).

#5 Cron Jobs Over Heartbeats

Instead of checking everything in heartbeats (main session, expensive context), use isolated cron jobs with cheap models. Email checks, weather updates, and monitoring all work perfectly on Haiku.

#6 Free Tiers Stack Up

Groq: free Whisper STT + free Llama. Google: free Gemini Flash. Edge TTS: free voice. Oracle Cloud: free VPS. Brave Search: 2000 free queries/mo. Stack these and your base cost approaches zero.

#7 Track Everything

You can't optimize what you don't measure. Monitor your API costs daily. OpenClaw shows token usage in session status. Set up alerts when spending exceeds thresholds. Our cost calculator helps estimate: openclawdashboard.com/guides/costs

Real Numbers

A user running everything on Opus spent ~$45/day. After implementing model tiering (Opus for strategy, Haiku for monitoring, Gemini for heartbeats), cost dropped to ~$8/day. Same functionality, 82% savings.

Calculate your exact costs with our interactive tool.

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