How much did the OpenClaw creator spend on OpenAI API?

$1,305,088.81 in 30 days covering 603 billion tokens across 7.6 million requests from ~100 Codex instances.

Who pays for OpenClaw's $1.3M OpenAI API bill?

OpenAI covers the cost. Peter Steinberger joined OpenAI in February 2026 and the API usage supports OpenClaw development.

How many Codex agents does OpenClaw run?

Approximately 100 Codex instances operated by a 3-person team to review PRs, scan commits, deduplicate issues, write fixes, and monitor benchmarks.

What would OpenClaw API cost be without Fast Mode?

Steinberger said disabling Codex Fast Mode would reduce the bill from $1.3M to around $300,000 per month.

How many tokens does OpenClaw consume per month?

603 billion tokens across 7.6 million requests in a single 30-day period.

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clawsmith.com/signal/openclaw-creator-1-3m-openai-api-30-days-100-codex-agents

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OpenClaw Creator Burns $1.3M on OpenAI API in 30 Days With 100 Codex Agents

Peter Steinberger posted a screenshot showing $1,305,088.81 in OpenAI spend over 30 days — 603 billion tokens across 7.6 million requests generated by ~100 Codex instances operated by a 3-person team. OpenAI covers the cost. Fast Mode pricing inflates the figure; standard mode would be ~$300K.

Product Idea from this Signal

A CLI tool that measures AI coding agent output per dollar spent by correlating git activity with provider billing to answer whether agent compute is worth the cost

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OpenClaw's creator just posted a $1.3M monthly OpenAI bill from 100 Codex agents, and the first community reaction was 'show me something $1M worth of engineers couldn't do.' Current tools track token costs, but nobody tracks what those tokens actually produced. Teams running 10-100 coding agents have no way to know if a $50K/month agent fleet ships more PRs, fixes more bugs, or reviews more code than the equivalent headcount. This tool hooks into git repos and LLM provider billing APIs to calculate cost-per-PR-merged, cost-per-bug-fixed, and cost-per-review-completed, then compares agent productivity against team baselines.

CLIOPEN-SOURCEDEVTOOLCOST-ANALYTICSAI-AGENTS

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