r/openclaw

Just got the email. Starting tomorrow at 12pm PT, tools like OpenClaw will no longer draw from your Claude subscription. They'll need "extra usage" — a separate pay-as-you-go layer billed on top of your existing sub. The carrot: one-time credit equal to your monthly plan price (redeem by April 17) and bundle discounts up to 30%. The stick: they're offering a full subscription refund if you don't want to play ball. For those of us running agentic pipelines, local orchestration daemons, or multi-model routing setups on top of Claude — this is a meaningful shift. "Subscription covers Claude Code and Cowork" is doing a lot of work in that email. Translation: if it's not our product, you're paying extra. LOL

Not surprised they're doing this. These harnesses hammer their infra in ways the average chat user doesn't. Still stings when you've built workflows around the subscription model.

Just got this email (pasted below), that spells out Anthropic’s full disdain for OpenClaw users, a project that started because of Claude.

TLDR; They are removing the ability you use your Claude Code CLI token or long lived oauth token. This means if you’re like me, and use your Claude Max subscription to power your OpenClaw, then it’s over.

As an early contributor to OpenClaw, I’m familiar with the codebase and know we already send Claude Code signatures for these tokens. I’m wondering how they are going to enforce this 🤔. Maybe they will update the signatures. Maybe theirs something more complex under the hood, like token refresh, either way, I can’t imagine we won’t figure it out. Then what’s to stop us from integrating it into the OC codebase?

That’s the first thing I’ll do if mine stop working. I’ll be the first to figure it out and submit the PR fix. It will take days to get in the codebase, so upvote and dm me, if you want the fix as soon as it comes out and I’ll send it your way.

Here’s the email below:

“Hi,

Starting April 4 at 12pm PT / 8pm BST, you’ll no longer be able to use your Claude subscription limits for third-party harnesses including OpenClaw. You can still use them with your Claude account, but they will require extra usage, a pay-as-you-go option billed separately from your subscription.

Your subscription still covers all Claude products, including Claude Code and Claude Cowork. To keep using third-party harnesses with your Claude login, turn on extra usage for your account. This will be enforced April 4 starting with OpenClaw, but this policy applies to all third-party harnesses and will be rolled out to more shortly (read more).

To make the transition easier, we’re offering a one-time credit for extra usage equal to your monthly subscription price. Redeem your credit by April 17. We’re also introducing discounts when you pre-purchase bundles of extra usage (up to 30%).

We’ve been working to manage demand across the board, but these tools put an outsized strain on our systems. Capacity is a resource we manage carefully and we need to prioritize our customers using our core products. You will receive another email from us tomorrow where you’ll have the ability to refund your subscription if you prefer.”

My suggestion, don’t enable extra billing. Shout out to mr-memory. GL.

Just got this email from anthropic

Hi,

Starting April 4 at 12pm PT / 8pm BST, you’ll no longer be able to use your Claude subscription limits for third-party harnesses including OpenClaw. You can still use them with your Claude account, but they will require extra usage, a pay-as-you-go option billed separately from your subscription.

Your subscription still covers all Claude products, including Claude Code and Claude Cowork. To keep using third-party harnesses with your Claude login, turn on extra usage for your account. This will be enforced April 4 starting with OpenClaw, but this policy applies to all third-party harnesses and will be rolled out to more shortly (read more).

To make the transition easier, we’re offering a one-time credit for extra usage equal to your monthly subscription price. Redeem your credit by April 17. We’re also introducing discounts when you pre-purchase bundles of extra usage (up to 30%).

We’ve been working to manage demand across the board, but these tools put an outsized strain on our systems. Capacity is a resource we manage carefully and we need to prioritize our customers using our core products. You will receive another email from us tomorrow where you’ll have the ability to refund your subscription if you prefer.

Just got the email from Anthropic:

*Hi,

Starting April 4 at 12pm PT / 8pm BST, you’ll no longer be able to use your Claude subscription limits for third-party harnesses including OpenClaw. You can still use them with your Claude account, but they will require extra usage, a pay-as-you-go option billed separately from your subscription.

Your subscription still covers all Claude products, including Claude Code and Claude Cowork. To keep using third-party harnesses with your Claude login, turn on extra usage for your account. This will be enforced April 4 starting with OpenClaw, but this policy applies to all third-party harnesses and will be rolled out to more shortly.*

It was good while it lasted - they are also giving you free credit equivalent to your monthly subscription, check your email

So I'm using Gemma4:26b on my mac studio. It runs. It can see images with uploading it into the ollama interface. Openclaw runs on a vps on a proxmox box right next to it (all in the same local network). I have my heartbeats and my design agent currently configured to the Gemma model. Everything seems to work.

I can't, for the life of me figure out why the agent cannot use the ollama Gemma4 model vision capabilities. It keeps getting aborted via ollama through telegram. What is going on? Has anyone gotten vision capabilities to work via ollama? I really don't want to burn tokens on openrouter or codex for this.

I've configured models.json and openclaw.json for the provider description to include both "text", "image" doesn't seem to help.

Just got this email:

Hi,

Starting April 4 at 12pm PT / 8pm BST, you’ll no longer be able to use your Claude subscription limits for third-party harnesses including OpenClaw. You can still use them with your Claude account, but they will require extra usage, a pay-as-you-go option billed separately from your subscription.

Now obviously it doesn't compete with Claude, Codex, or Gemini, but this is perfect if you're doing multi-routing, a small and capable selfhosted model can save you a lot of tokens.

More info for various sizes:

• E2B (2.3B effective params): Built for edge devices like phones and Raspberry Pi. It requires ~4-8GB RAM and runs well on a CPU, this is the model to go for to host on your VPS.
• E4B (4.5B effective params): Built for laptops and low-end hardware. It maintains a low memory footprint.
• 26B MoE (25B total, 3.8B active): Built for consumer GPUs. It runs at inference speeds similar to a 4B model.
• 31B Dense: Built for mid-range GPUs and workstations. It requires approximately 16-20GB VRAM when using 4-bit quantization.

Key Capabilities:

• All models are multimodal (text and vision).
• The E2B and E4B edge models support real-time audio.
• Built for advanced reasoning and agentic workflows.

Available on Google AI Studio, HF, Kaggle, and Ollama

Hey there. I wanted to experiment with what I have before investing into anything else and boy am I glad so far that I did.

I set it up on a Raspberry Pi 4B 8GB and the chat speed seems fine. I hooked up my Anthropic API key and I had my new agent help build a tracker for me. Health log (meals, exercise, stress, symptoms) and then went to build an inventory log for things I wanted to keep track of and I ran out of tokens. It cost me $5 in tokens in about an hour of asking it to do stuff. I know it was sending the entire history each time, so the messages get incrementally expensive. I even did a /new command on telegram to start over because I noticed it creeping up quickly on the API page for Claude.

Did I set this up just super wrong? Or is it a token hog?

Full email from Anthropic:

Hi,

Starting April 4 at 12pm PT / 8pm BST, you’ll no longer be able to use your Claude subscription limits for third-party harnesses including OpenClaw. You can still use them with your Claude account, but they will require extra usage, a pay-as-you-go option billed separately from your subscription.

Your subscription still covers all Claude products, including Claude Code and Claude Cowork. To keep using third-party harnesses with your Claude login, turn on extra usage for your account. This will be enforced April 4 starting with OpenClaw, but this policy applies to all third-party harnesses and will be rolled out to more shortly (read more).

To make the transition easier, we’re offering a one-time credit for extra usage equal to your monthly subscription price. Redeem your credit by April 17. We’re also introducing discounts when you pre-purchase bundles of extra usage (up to 30%).

We’ve been working to manage demand across the board, but these tools put an outsized strain on our systems. Capacity is a resource we manage carefully and we need to prioritize our customers using our core products. You will receive another email from us tomorrow where you’ll have the ability to refund your subscription if you prefer.

I started messing around with openclaw and as many of us in here found it very frustrating to get it all set up. Nevermind the expense of messing with tokens. That was a big learning curve. With Claude now bringing many of the features from openclaw to the general public, is inevitable that many of openclaw's features will be obsolete. How long do you figure the tool has? What does it need to do to stay relevant?

Just got this email an hour ago. This is terrible news.

My agents use Haiku or cron and research tasks. But I have been relying heavily on Opus with my Claude Max subscription to do analysis and task execution.

What now - Ollama, Gemma 4? Not sure cheaper local models will cut it for my use cases. What is everyone's plan?

__

Starting April 4 at 12pm PT / 8pm BST, you’ll no longer be able to use your Claude subscription limits for third-party harnesses including OpenClaw. You can still use them with your Claude account, but they will require extra usage, a pay-as-you-go option billed separately from your subscription.

Your subscription still covers all Claude products, including Claude Code and Claude Cowork. To keep using third-party harnesses with your Claude login, turn on extra usage for your account. This will be enforced April 4 starting with OpenClaw, but this policy applies to all third-party harnesses and will be rolled out to more shortly...

i noticed the subreddit has a lot of AI automated posts and comments. it makes it hard to interact when you know you're talking to an AI agent. i think it would be great if we moderated them more either:

1. they indicate the content is AI generated on the post or comment.

2. ban the accounts.

would love hear peoples thoughts!

I hardly see people share use cases for openclaw that’s not about making money or work related.

I have been playing with claw 3 weeks now and having a blast. I am not making money or trying to make money at all but am just using it as a life organizer and make it fun while doing so.

I have built skills relating to spend tracking (hate to use tools normally, but just dump cc bill pdf into claw through discord is easy. ) I built web frontend for viewing the data too.

I also built fine dining tracking so I can record all the nice places I been to and can remember exactly where I have been later on. Including full photo stream

I also built travel plan and travel log with the web front end to view stuff.

Data entry with agent is so much easier when you just have to talk to them through regular chat and the agent builds the front end for data viewing.

Since I am running mine on a dgx spark so I have enough memory to run a lot of things local including some mid size LLM and comfy ui together. My agent has setup comfy ui entirely without me needing to do a thing. From docker setup to configuration to model/checkpoint/lora download to even node construction and usage of comfyui through api interface. Of course another front end was built to view and manage the file. I only need to talk to agent to create scenario files in json and the agent wrote script to process those json. Prompting with agent is so much better than doing it yourself. I got into Lora training And animation of generated image too now. Everything through agent and I have not once touched comfyui web interface

There are so many more ideas I have and I would like to try all of them.

Anyone else just having fun with this new capability? Feels like open claw has replace video gaming for me (at least for now)

I created world's 1st Openclaw skill that will automate your bathroom schedule.

I found myself constantly not knowing what comes next, dump? flush? wash hands? wipe? well just because of that issue, I created this skill. This skill solves that issue by messaging you every step of the way and telling you what comes next. I call it: Bawl Claw.

I know some of you out there will say:

•this is a useless skill

•what problem does it solve

•ran out of ideas

•for these bullet points

•but will keep spamming them

For those I will say: did your wife ever complain how much you stay in the bathroom? Now she won't. With my 99$/month plan she can join your openclaw telegram bot chat and see exactly what you are doing in the bathroom so long. She will receive the same updates you do.

For more advanced users (gamers, coffee drinkers, paper readers) and bathroom connoisseurs, for 200$ a month I can integrate your complex workflow in n8n and Notion for free!

Anyway, ask me anything in the comments and I'll send you more slop.

Ok so I have installed openclaw couple days ago

played alot with it

installed it via clawdboss.ai

then did a manual upgrade

and played with the memory-hybrid code to allow it to use azure text embeddings instead of openai apis

then I ran the following agents all through azure foundry

gpt-5.3-chat main agent

gpt-4o

gpt-5.1-mini

gpt-5.1-codex-mini ( never worked a lot of errors and 400s removed it later )

kimi-k2.5

deepseek-v3.2

I had deepseek and kimi at reasoning false

and gpt5.3-chat at reasoning true

Deepseek and kimi sucks at tool calling

they went in a loop just to call a tool kept saying working on it working on it for like 8 messages i kept sending to it for updates

and finally found it didn't even call the tools , really bad probably better at coding but I don't trust them no more.

got4o is decent but very expensive

gpt5.3-chat is normal it is not good it keeps on asking again and again and tries to not call a lot of tools or tries to make me run the commands but when I keep on pushing it, it runs correctly

but the cost is terrible just a 3 hour session getting it to play with the configs and setup some plugins byitself costed me 15mil input tokens and 800k output tokens on gpt5.3 with 2 compacts manually and 3 new sessions in between

I am pretty sure I am doing something wrong but again I am here for some help

I want to have the following setup and I am trying to get it right

Main Agent ( My assistant and the one responsible to spin up tasks and cronjoba for other agents) my chat point

Research Agent ( Responsible for searching for any information on the internet requested by any other agent or by me, and saves the results in a structured md files along with the memory-hybrid stuff)

IT Agent ( Responsible for maintaining the vm openclaw is running on, fixing updates and making sure plugins are working right etc.. and keeping an md file with all open and closed ports all used ports and all the ports we used previously but closed later on, and any tasks I ask to be made in the cli like installations and firewall stuff)

Project Manager Agent ( Responsible for taking my ideas and tasks and planning them into requirements and specs sheets in md files for the Other agents to proceed on them)

Senior Developer Agent ( Responsible for taking the req and specs sheets and deligating them into tasks divided into 2 main parts Front end and Back end and making all the tasks into clear valid points with acceptance criteria)

Senior QA Developer Agent ( Responsible for creating test cases from the tasks and reqs made by the senior dev and pm)

Frontend Agent ( Responsible for working on all of the frontend tasks given to.him by the Senior Dev while using git and making pull requests cant merge directly)

Backend Agent ( Responsible for working on all of the backend tasks.given to him by the Senior dev while using git and making pull requests cant merge directly)

Senior Security Developer ( Responsible for going through every code PR on github and approving it or rejecting it for security reasons like un encrypted passwords. and then adding it as tasks again to its responsible agent Front or Back, once approved by him goes to the Senior Dev Agent for final approval)

Senior Developer Agent again ( Responsible for merging and accepting all PRs and the ones rejected by him has to be sent back as tasks again with notes)

This is the stack I want to have for my Development Agents

I am thinking about using claude code 100$ to use opus and sonnet, along with minmax or glm5.1 but not sure what to use where I cannot afford the 200$ for now I am literally paying around 1/5 of my salary into the 100$ subscription

so if maybe I can get opus to plan and approve security prs maybe?

claude sonnet to do the senior dev stuff of writing the tasks and the final prs

minmax or glm for the frontend and backend tasks

and then haiku or gpt4o for the heartbeats and research agent and main agent and them for the it agent maybe sonnet? or glm?

and the test cases gpt5.3-chat?

I have azure access to the simple gpt models, no codex full or.max only the mini 5.1 and the 5.3- chat and deepseek and k2.5 only

I can try to pay for 130$ monthly max in total supscriptions

I was thinking 100$ claude max x5

10$ GLM coding starter plan

10$ Minmax starter plan

and 10$ in apis for openrouter for whatever we might need?

the azure is a fund I have for my project so I am not.paying for it for now.

Please help if you can by guiding me what to use here and any tips for the setup would be appreciated.

Been running OpenClaw since early Feb and finally looked at the observability dashboard today.

88 million tokens. $40 total.

Honestly not terrible for 2 months of usage but seeing 88 million in one place is wild. Anyone else keeping track of their spending? Would love to know what setups people are running and what it's costing them.

KEY WORD: FREE!!!

I have been recently trying to identify ways to have a free tier service (or minimal cost) to experiment with OpenClaw. After some research, I find that if I only need a 24-hours OpenClaw Gateway, then there are many free cloud Ubuntu instances for me to use. However, then I still need to pay LLM tokens. That could be easily expensive. So I want to have a way to host a free LLM also.

After extensive research, I identified that Oracle Cloud free tier could be the perfect solution. In the Oracle Cloud free tier, you can theoretically get an ARM based Ubuntu instance with 4 OCPUs, 24GB RAM, and 200GB SSD. This will be perfect to host a local LLM based on Qwen3.5 27B A3B 4-bit model and also the OpenClaw Gateway. I decided to go this way.

The challenge is that Oracle cloud provided limited machines for this free tier (shape: VM.Standard.A1.Flex). So you have to try all the time and can only generate one when someone else delete their instances there. I cannot wait and have no time to do that. So I decided to use the shape VM.Standard.A2.Flex. This shape is not permanently free. But since Oracle will give you 300$ credit, you can use this credit to run your 24GB RAM, 4OCPU server for free for 6 months. This is good enough for me to do all the tests. And I can decide what to do after 6 months.

I have tried to provide all the configuration files and a Linux scripts to automatically do all of the following steps.. but my posts were deleted since it violates some policy of this group. In the following, I briefly summarize what I have done there.

1. generate the 4 OCPUs, 24GB RAM, and 200GB SSD ARM Linux in the shape VM.Standard.A2.Flex
2. Please note that you can only generate the minimized Ubuntu for ARM based instances. For the LLM+OpenClaw, we really need a regular Ubuntu. So after you start your instance, please run "sudo unminimize" to get a regular version of Ubuntu.
3. The process may have some challenges, I do recommend that you use AI to help you to troubleshoot during the process.
4. Skip Docker, Go Native. Do not install Docker Version of OpenClaw. It is hard to configure. I tried that, but I decided to revert it back to free Ubuntu instance and install the native one.
5. Install the qwen3.5 LLM and then configure your OpenClaw to use local LLM
6. Everything is fine and working now. But since it is in Cloud, we need some way to remotely manage and configure them:-)
7. I found an app in the Apple Store called "QCAI", again, I am not supposed to post the direct link here. But you can search the Apple Store to find the app easily. They have an Android version also and you can get that if you want.
8. If you want to use QCAI app to manage your cloud "OpenClaw+LLM", you need to do some configurations. The QCAI app has detailed instructions for you to make that work. I can briefly summarize it here
9. You need to install tailscale VPN and then configure your OpenClaw openclaw.json file briefly to let your app to access your OpenClaw dashboard in the QCAI app itstelf.
10. The QCAP app also has a claw-portal that access your OpenClaw output directly via browser based interface. Better than using the telegram text channel.
11. I also run Claude Code on the Oracle Gateway.. Fortunately, the iOS app also give me an interface to remotely run the Claude Code there.

Until now, I am happy and have a 27x7 OpenClaw+LLM+Claude Code without a single penny spent. I can use this for free for the next 6 months:-) After that, I may ask my friend to register another account for me at Oracle and I can have another 6 months for free

I have 12gb vram and 32gb ram but as of today my local models are saying there's not enough ram. What could be causing this? Nothing has changed in the system.

I had openclaw scrape some pages, then i told it to filter the info. It couldn't even filter info correctly without me asking it five times over - and by filtering, i mean i said 'only include items that are under $100' for examlpe.
Is minimax 2.5 really not smart enough? It seems like its really good according to benchmarks

Cisco report said openclaw security is ""optional, not built in"" and looking at the default config it's obvious why. API keys in .env files on whatever VPS you run it on, root access means full visibility. For my own project whatever, but I want to recommend this to non-technical people and them running it on a $5 droplet with default everything and anthropic keys in plaintext is a no from me.

Anyone have a hardened deployment guide or a security config the community has standardized on?