I Run Five OpenClaw Agents for 72 Cents a Day
The default OpenClaw heartbeat is burning wallets. A 3-line config change — 55m interval, gpt-4o-mini on the loop, activeHours window — stacks to a 98% cost reduction. Here is the math, the config, and the free template.
Five OpenClaw agents run the content and executive-assistant pipeline for MACONA — a nonprofit I volunteer with — at $0.72 a day. The most common support question on r/OpenClaw is “$25 in 9 hours, help.” The gap between those two numbers is three config decisions stacked on top of each other: heartbeat interval, model on the loop, and hours of operation. None of them are clever. All of them are usually set wrong by default.
