How Much Does OpenClaw Cost to Run?
OpenClaw itself is free and MIT-licensed. Running it costs hosting plus LLM API usage, typically under $100 a month for one person: a $5–20 VPS, plus a model bill that swings with how hard your agent works.
OpenClaw is free to download and use: it is MIT-licensed open source with 15,000+ GitHub stars. There is no licence fee, ever. The monthly cost comes entirely from running it, and that splits into two parts: the server and the model.
For a typical single user, the all-in figure lands under $100 a month, often well under. The variable part is the LLM, so your bill tracks how busy you keep the agent.
How it works
Three things determine what you actually pay:
- Hosting. OpenClaw needs roughly 2 cores, 2 GB RAM and 2 GB storage. A VPS in that class runs $5 to $20 a month. A Railway one-click deploy sits at the higher end but skips server admin.
- LLM API usage. This is the swing factor. OpenClaw is LLM-agnostic, so you choose: DeepSeek for low cost, Claude or GPT for stronger reasoning, Gemini in between. You pay per token, so frequent heartbeats and long tasks raise the bill.
- Heartbeat frequency.
HEARTBEAT.mdcontrols how often the agent wakes and acts on its own. A chatty schedule consumes more tokens than a once-a-day briefing. Tuning it is one of the levers you have on cost.
There is no per-task credit system to second-guess. You pay your model provider directly and transparently per token.
Worked example
A realistic monthly estimate for one person, light versus heavy usage:
| Item | Light agent | Heavy agent |
|---|---|---|
| Software (OpenClaw) | Free | Free |
| VPS | ~$5 | ~$15 |
| LLM API | ~$10 (DeepSeek, daily briefing) | ~$60+ (Claude, frequent heartbeats) |
| Monthly total | ~$15 | ~$75+ |
A quiet agent on a cheap model is genuinely inexpensive. A busy one on a frontier model still stays under the $100 mark for most single users. The cost to self-host an AI agent page works through the same maths for any open-source agent, and is OpenClaw free covers the licence side. Remember the one cost the table omits: your time, around 1 to 3 hours a month of maintenance.
Common questions
Is there a licence fee for OpenClaw?
No. It is MIT-licensed, so the software is free to use and modify forever.
What is the single biggest cost?
Usually the LLM API. Hosting is small and fixed; the model bill grows with usage.
How can I lower the cost?
Use a cheaper model like DeepSeek, trim heartbeat frequency, and keep tasks tight. These are the main levers.
How does this compare to Manus?
Manus is credit-priced (Pro $20–200/month), and complex tasks can burn 500 to 900 credits, making costs hard to predict. OpenClaw’s per-token billing is more transparent.
Are managed OpenClaw hosts cheaper?
Hosts like OneClaw run around $12–22/month and save server admin, but you still pay LLM costs and get little security or compliance.
Will costs rise as I add integrations?
Mostly indirectly: more capability tends to mean more agent activity, which means more tokens. The base hosting stays the same.