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clawsmith.com/idea/enforce-per-session-token-budgets-and-auto-prune-openclaw-context
IdeaCompetitiveBACKGROUND-SERVICECOST-OPTIMIZATIONOPEN-SOURCELive

A background service that enforces per-session token budgets on OpenClaw agents, auto-prunes context when limits approach, and reports cost per task

OpenClaw retains all conversation history by default, growing from 5K tokens in round 1 to 150K by round 10. Users routinely hit $50-100/day in API costs running stock configurations. Memory consumption climbs to 28GB by day three. Existing tools show token usage after the fact or add a kill-switch, but nothing actively manages the context window in real time by pruning low-value messages, enforcing per-session budgets, and attributing cost to individual tasks. This service sits between OpenClaw and the LLM provider, intercepts every request, enforces configurable token budgets, and auto-prunes context using a relevance scorer before the request hits the API.

Demand Breakdown

BLOG
354
GitHub
312

Gap Assessment

CompetitiveMultiple tools exist but differentiation opportunities remain

3 tools exist (OpenClaw Firewall, OpenClaw Token Monitor Chrome Extension, token-budget-monitor skill) but gaps remain: No context auto-pruning, no semantic relevance scoring, no per-task cost attribution, no cache-hit tracking; Browser-only, no server-side enforcement, no context pruning, no multi-session tracking.

Features4 agent-ready prompts

Transparent proxy that intercepts OpenClaw-to-LLM requests, counts tokens pre-flight, and rejects requests that would exceed the per-session or per-day budget
Context auto-pruner that scores each message in the conversation by recency, role, and semantic relevance to the current task, then drops the lowest-scoring messages to fit within the token budget
Per-task cost attribution dashboard that tags each OpenClaw agent session with the task it was performing and shows cost breakdown per task, per agent, per day
OpenRouter cache-hit rate tracker that measures how often the X-OpenRouter-Cache headers result in actual cache hits and reports savings

Competitive LandscapeFREE

ProductDoesMissing
OpenClaw FirewallGateway layer between OpenClaw and model providers that tracks token usage in real time, sets per-agent budgets, caps retries, and blocks abnormal requestsNo context auto-pruning, no semantic relevance scoring, no per-task cost attribution, no cache-hit tracking
OpenClaw Token Monitor Chrome ExtensionCalculates real-time token usage in browser and acts as a kill-switch when a pre-set dollar limit is reachedBrowser-only, no server-side enforcement, no context pruning, no multi-session tracking
token-budget-monitor skillLightweight Node-based OpenClaw skill that tracks per-job input/output tokens and enforces daily and per-job limits from configSkill-level only (no proxy interception), no context pruning, no cost attribution dashboard, no cache tracking

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