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I find some value as kinda a better alexa. I have it hooked up to my smart home stuff, like my speaker and smart lights and TV, and I've given it various skill
by TheDong 6mo ago
I find some value as kinda a better alexa.
I have it hooked up to my smart home stuff, like my speaker and smart lights and TV, and I've given it various skills to talk to those things.
I can message it "Play my X playlist" or "Give me the gorillaz song I was listening to yesterday"
I can also message it "Download Titanic to my jellyfin server and queue it up", and it'll go straight to the pirate bay.
It having a browser and the ability to run cli tools, and also understand English well enough to know that "Give me some Beatles" means to use its audio skill, means it's a vastly better alexa
It only costs me like $180 a month in API credits (now that they banned using the max plan), so seems okay still.
- coldtea 6mo agoRegarding Alexa, none of those use cases sound that useful to have an ever-present listening device at home, except if one is bedbound or something.
- puelocesar 6mo ago180 grand a month for PA is a lot of money. But I guess each person has its own priority. I mean, I can pay a very fancy gym with that price instead of the shitty popular one I go, which would probably improve my well being much more than asking to play Gorillaz
- quietbritishjim 6mo ago"a grand" means a thousand (dollars or pounds or whatever). $180k / month really would be a lot of money. I'd be your PA for that!
- puelocesar 6mo agook, now I wish there was an edit button. Thanks for noticing the mistake though
- tikotus 6mo agoI don't want to be judgemental, but I do find it funny that you're paying $180 for this convenience, and use it to pirate movies.
- TeMPOraL 6mo agoIt's not the only thing they're doing with it. I mean, the logic is sound - $180 goes into automating bunch of manual processes in personal life, one of which is getting movies, which in some cases involves going out on the high seas.
- LeCompteSftware 6mo agoLet's also point out the $180 is going to a hideously evil AI company which pirated millions of books and movies.
- llmocallm 6mo agoThen allow me to be judgemental in your stead. I've done a similar setup as the above and completely locally. I dunno how they're paying so much, but that's ridiculously overpriced.
- TheDong 6mo agoAll the other models performed much worse for the skills I'm using. I tried gpt-5.1 (and then 5.4 again recently), and also tried pointing it at OpenRouter and using a few of the cheaper models, and all of them added too much friction for me. Be judgemental all you want, but I feel like I'm paying for less friction, and also more security since my experiments also showed claude to be the least vulnerable to prompt injection attempts.
- wasfgwp 6mo ago> models performed much worse for the skills I'm using Hard to believe unless your are doing something much more complex than the things you listed
- simonkagedal 6mo ago
- retired 6mo ago> It only costs me like $180 a month in API credits In The Netherlands you can get a live-in au-pair from the Philippines for less than that. She will happily play your Beatles song, download the Titanic movie for you, find your Gorillaz song and even cook and take care of your children. It's horrible that we have such human exploitation in 2026, but it does put into perspective how much those credits are if you can get a real-life person doing those tasks for less.
- quietbritishjim 6mo agoI'm surprised to read that. Here in the UK, having a live-in au pair doesn't excuse you from paying the minimum wage for all the hours that they're working (approx $2300/month for a 35 hour week). You can deduct an amount to account for the fact that you're providing accomodation but it's strictly limited (approx $400/month).
- swiftcoder 6mo agoThe Netherlands has a weird and exploitative setup where you can classify your au pair as a "cultural exchange", and then pay them literal peanuts (room and board plus a token amount of "pocket money")
- __alexs 6mo agoAnother weird cultural quirk of the Dutch that will hopefully go the way of Zwarte Piet one day.
- retired 6mo agoFrom what I can see online, the average compensation that an au-pair in The Netherlands receives is 300 euro per month, with living expenses being covered by the family. There is no minimum wage requirement for au-pairs like in the UK or the US.
- aianus 6mo agoA semi-skilled English-speaking customer service agent in PH makes less than $700 a month to put this into perspective. Working abroad is a totally reasonable proposition compared to working in the Philippines.
- bluedel 6mo agoAm I right to be a little concerned by the phrase "it'll go straight to the pirate bay"? Not to be a narc or anything, but is OpenClaw liable to just perform illegal acts on your behalf just because it seemed like that's what you meant for it to do?
- jappgar 6mo agoSeems like the only people using pirate bay in 2026 are "privacy obsessed" rich middle-aged guys. I think they do it mostly to feel young and edgy.
- Supermancho 6mo agoI use it to get media for my family to watch on any tv using Plex. Sometimes I get books/manuals etc.
- esseph 6mo ago> Not to be a narc or anything, but is OpenClaw liable to just perform illegal acts on your behalf just because it seemed like that's what you meant for it to do? There's at least a couple of dozen instances right now, somewhere, getting very close to designing boutique chemical weapons.
- swiftcoder 6mo ago> It only costs me like $180 a month in API credits (now that they banned using the max plan), so seems okay still. I have a hard time imagining how much better Alexa would have to be for me to spend $180/month on it...
- miroljub 6mo agoJust to clarify to people focusing on the $180/month price tag. OpenClaw is not a CC-only product. You can configure it to use any API endpoint. Paying $180/month to Anthropic is a personal choice, not a requirement to use OpenClaw.
- ThunderSizzle 6mo agoSo that leads to a question: Is there a physical box I could buy that an amortize over 5-7 years to be half the API cost? In other words, assuming no price increase, 7 years of that pricing is $15k. Is there hardware I could buy for $7k or less that would be able to replace those API calls or alternativr subs entirely? I've personally been trying to determine if I should buy a new GC on my aging desktop(s), since their graphic cards can't really handle LLMs)
- ekidd 6mo agoYou can't realistically replace a frontier coding model on any local hardware that costs less than a nice house, and even then it's not going to be quite as good. But if you don't need frontier coding abilities, there are several nice models that you can run on a video card with 24GB to 32GB of VRAM. (So a 5090 or a used 3090.) Try Gemma4 and Qwen3.5 with 4-bit quantization from Unsloth, and look at models in the 20B to 35B range. You can try before you buy if you drop $20 on OpenRouter. I have a setup like this that I built for $2500 last year, before things got expensive, and it's a nice little "home lab." If you want to go bigger than this, you're looking at an RTX 6000 card, or a Mac Studio with 128GB to 512GB of RAM. These are outside your budget. Or you could look at a Mac Minis, DGX Spark or Strix Halo. These let you bigger models much slower, mostly.
- Hendrikto 6mo ago180$/month to queue playlists does not “seem okay” at all. We must be living in different worlds.
- qsera 6mo agoI have the almost same thing using a network connected raspberry-pi and no AI.
- bigger_fish 6mo ago[dead]
- jappgar 6mo agoYou're spendin 180 a month on tokens and still refusing to buy media like Titanic?
- TheDong 6mo agoIf you've figured out how to pirate Anthropic's models and enough GPUs to run it for less than my API costs, I'm all ears
- janderson215 6mo agoWhile I love the idea of using it for home/personal automation (and it sounds like you've done a good job executing it), this comment makes it seem like avoiding paying for The Titanic is almost as important as having an OpenClaw-driven assistant/automation system.
- jappgar 6mo agoI haven't but I have figured out how to pay creators for media I enjoy. I spend less than 180 a month too.
- tempaccount5050 6mo agoUsing OpenClaw for that is nuts. Claude or GPT could just one shot an app for you that does all that and uses 0 tokens once you've built it.
- philipallstar 6mo ago> "Download Titanic to my jellyfin server and queue it up", and it'll go straight to the pirate bay You could build up a legitimate collection for much less than $180/mo.
- xorcist 6mo ago> I can message it "Play my X playlist" People do this? Or is it some sort of joke way above my head? In what bizarre world is it easier to ask a massive LLM to play a playlist rather than ... literally hitting the play key on it?
- chasd00 6mo agoOne where there's 50 playlists and your hands are wet because you're right in the middle of doing dishes. Besides, your phone is in the other room anyway.
- kirubakaran 6mo agoI'd use a towel for such purposes :)
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]