Peter Steinberger spent $1.3 million on tokens in 30 days to keep OpenClaw running with a skeleton crew. Hermes is now outperforming it, raising questions about whether token costs can replace traditional payroll for maintaining open-source projects.
Hermes is starting to overtake OpenClaw because Peter Steinberger, he spent $1.3 million on tokens in the span of 30 days. It's like, oh, this is open source. How is it 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 have spent on maybe payroll in the past. What did they spend the $1.3 million on? His point is saying that the $1.3 million that I'm spending a month on this keeps OpenClaw stable with a very lean team. Got it.
