This sounds awesome and exactly like the easy and safe on-ramp to OpenClaw that I've been looking for! I want to believe.
Two questions as a potential user who knows the gist of OpenClaw but has been afraid to try it:
1. I don't understand how the two consumption credits play into the total cost of ownership. E.g. how long will $20 of Orthogonal credits last me? I have no idea what it will actually cost to use Klaus/OpenClaw for a month.
2. Batteries included sounds great, but what are those batteries? I've never heard of Apollo or Hunter.io so I don't know the value of them being included.
In general, a lot of your copy sounds like it's written for people already deep into OpenClaw. Since you're not targeting those folks, I would steer more towards e.g. articulating use cases that work ootb and a TCO estimate for less technical folks. Good luck, and I'm eager to try it!
TheDong 27 minutes ago [-]
The cost of ownership for an OpenClaw, and how many credits you'll use, is really hard to estimate since it depends so wildly on what you do.
I can give you an openclaw instruction that will burn over $20k worth of credits in a matter of hours.
You could also not talk to your claw at all for the entire month, setup no crons / reoccurring activities / webhooks / etc, and get a bill of under $1 for token usage.
My usage of OpenClaw ends up costing on the order of $200/mo in tokens with the claude code max plan (which you're technically not allowed to use with OpenClaw anymore), or over $2000 if I were using API credits I think (which Klause is I believe, based on their FAQ mentioning OpenRouter).
So yeah, what I consider fairly light and normal usage of OpenClaw can quite easily hit $2000/mo, but it's also very possible to hit only $5/mo.
Most of my tokens are eaten up by having it write small pieces of code, and doing a good amount of web browser orchestration. I've had 2 sentence prompts that result in it spinning up subagents to browse and summarize thousands of webpages, which really eats a lot of tokens.
I've also given my OpenClaw access to its own AWS account, and it's capable of spinning up lambdas, ec2 instances, writing to s3, etc, and so it also right now has an AWS bill of around $100/mo (which I only expect to go up).
I haven't given it access to my credit card directly yet, so it hasn't managed to buy gift cards for any of the friendly nigerian princes that email it to chat, but I assume that's only a matter of time.
robthompson2018 10 minutes ago [-]
Our average user spends $50 a month all-in (tokens and subscription). If you're budget conscious you can use a cheap model (eg Gemini Flash) or even a free one. I confess I am a snob and only use Claude Opus, but even using OpenClaw all day every day I only spend about $500 a month on tokens.
Orthogonal credits are used more frequently by power users. For everyday tasks they'll last a very long time, I don't think any of our users have run out.
Some example Orthogonal user cases:
* customers in sales uses Apollo to get contact info for leads
* I use Exa search to help me prepare for calls by getting background info on customers and businesses
* I used SearchAPI to help find AirBnbs.
Point taken on the copy! We made this writing more technical for the HackerNews audience and try to use less jargon on other platforms.
nullcathedral 26 minutes ago [-]
Do you run a dedicated "AI SRE" instance for each customer or how do you ensure there is no potential for cross-contamination or data leakage across customers?
Basically how do you make sure your "AI SRE" does not deviate from it's task and cause mayhem in the VM, or worse. Exfiltrates secrets, or other nasty things? :)
baileywickham 15 minutes ago [-]
We run a dedicated AI SRE for each instance with scoped creds for just their instance. OpenClaw by nature has security risks so we want to limit those as much as possible. We only provision integrations the user has explicitly configured.
hasa 49 minutes ago [-]
I get impression that this is automation tool for sales people. Does it do robotic phone calls to try to book meetings with customers?
robthompson2018 7 minutes ago [-]
We certainly have customers who work in sales, but that's not the only use case.
OpenClaw is capable of using ElevenLabs or other providers to make phone calls, but I personally haven't done this and as far as I know none of our customers have either. Is AI good enough at cold calling yet for this to work? I personally would never entertain such a call.
baileywickham 57 minutes ago [-]
Co founder Bailey here, happy to answer questions.
orsorna 42 minutes ago [-]
Does the claw in the VM have proven capability (verified by your team) to track changes it makes to itself and persist across reboots? What about rollback capability?
baileywickham 36 minutes ago [-]
We allow you to backup to a private Github repo you own so if you want to version control your setup that way you can. Otherwise most changes are tracked in the chat history and the LLM has some ability to repair itself or validate changes before they are made.
Rendered at 16:58:12 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Two questions as a potential user who knows the gist of OpenClaw but has been afraid to try it: 1. I don't understand how the two consumption credits play into the total cost of ownership. E.g. how long will $20 of Orthogonal credits last me? I have no idea what it will actually cost to use Klaus/OpenClaw for a month. 2. Batteries included sounds great, but what are those batteries? I've never heard of Apollo or Hunter.io so I don't know the value of them being included.
In general, a lot of your copy sounds like it's written for people already deep into OpenClaw. Since you're not targeting those folks, I would steer more towards e.g. articulating use cases that work ootb and a TCO estimate for less technical folks. Good luck, and I'm eager to try it!
I can give you an openclaw instruction that will burn over $20k worth of credits in a matter of hours.
You could also not talk to your claw at all for the entire month, setup no crons / reoccurring activities / webhooks / etc, and get a bill of under $1 for token usage.
My usage of OpenClaw ends up costing on the order of $200/mo in tokens with the claude code max plan (which you're technically not allowed to use with OpenClaw anymore), or over $2000 if I were using API credits I think (which Klause is I believe, based on their FAQ mentioning OpenRouter).
So yeah, what I consider fairly light and normal usage of OpenClaw can quite easily hit $2000/mo, but it's also very possible to hit only $5/mo.
Most of my tokens are eaten up by having it write small pieces of code, and doing a good amount of web browser orchestration. I've had 2 sentence prompts that result in it spinning up subagents to browse and summarize thousands of webpages, which really eats a lot of tokens.
I've also given my OpenClaw access to its own AWS account, and it's capable of spinning up lambdas, ec2 instances, writing to s3, etc, and so it also right now has an AWS bill of around $100/mo (which I only expect to go up).
I haven't given it access to my credit card directly yet, so it hasn't managed to buy gift cards for any of the friendly nigerian princes that email it to chat, but I assume that's only a matter of time.
Orthogonal credits are used more frequently by power users. For everyday tasks they'll last a very long time, I don't think any of our users have run out.
Some example Orthogonal user cases:
* customers in sales uses Apollo to get contact info for leads
* I use Exa search to help me prepare for calls by getting background info on customers and businesses
* I used SearchAPI to help find AirBnbs.
Point taken on the copy! We made this writing more technical for the HackerNews audience and try to use less jargon on other platforms.
Basically how do you make sure your "AI SRE" does not deviate from it's task and cause mayhem in the VM, or worse. Exfiltrates secrets, or other nasty things? :)
OpenClaw is capable of using ElevenLabs or other providers to make phone calls, but I personally haven't done this and as far as I know none of our customers have either. Is AI good enough at cold calling yet for this to work? I personally would never entertain such a call.