OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger spends $1.3M monthly on AI tokens, but it's actually cheaper than payroll. He runs multiple AI instances to review code, close issues, scan for security problems, and handle maintenance on what's essentially a one-person open-source project.
But another thing is, I don't know if you saw this, Neil, but OpenClaw's founder, okay, Peter Steinberger, he spent $1.3 million on tokens in the span of 30 days, right? So he's like, people are freaking out over my token spends, but here's what nobody sees. So people are like, they're freaking out about it, the $1.3 million. It's like, how do you justify it, right? So he's actually justifying it here, and I think it's helpful for people to understand what the perceived ROI might be. So here's what he says. He says, here's what nobody sees. Part of what excites me so much about working at OpenClaw is that I'm trying to answer the question, How would we build software in the future if tokens don't matter? We constantly run 100 Codex in the cloud, reviewing every PR, every issue. If a fix on main lands, Claw Sweeper will eventually find that 6-month-old issue and close it with an exact reference. So he's just saying all these things. Okay, security issues, right? Deduplicating things, complex steps, ephemeral machines, log into Telegram. So basically he's trying to— I guess he's just saying that he's improving this quickly at scale. And he's saying that all this automation allows us to run this project extremely lean, which is interesting because there's a lot of people that actually use OpenClaw. But here's the thing, we'll just leave it at that for a moment, 'cause I wanna say that Hermes is starting to overtake OpenClaw. But Hermes has a much, I would say they have a more significant team, but OpenClaw has been able to get by so far until now where he's been saying that, hey, they're actually building a team around this. So it's interesting to see this because it's like, oh, this is open source. How is this so good? It's only one person doing it. But the reality now is like what's covering for it is actually that token spend. That token spend is actually what you would've spent on maybe payroll in the past. Yeah. Oh, what did they spend the $1.3 million on? Or what are this— All this stuff over here, this, uh, all this automation to help with just maintaining. But like, what was the end result? Like, what did you, what did he get at the end of— I think his point is, his point is saying that the $1.3 that I'm spending a month on this keeps OpenClaw stable with a very lean team. Got it. Yeah. So it's more so maintenance. Yes. So maintenance, security issues, and a lot of tests that they need to run. That's all he's saying over here. Scans for comments for spam and blocking pages.
