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OpenClaw Creator Spent $1.3M on OpenAI Tokens in 30 Days
- mtct88 5mo agoIt's a very peculiar way to flex.
- Avicebron 5mo agoIt's like the nerd equivalent of rolling coal?
- discordance 5mo agoI work at a bigtech and we’re being measured on how many tokens we consume. We know it’s totally stupid, but unfortunately tokenmaxxing is real. I know our management line isn’t that dumb, but this is what you get when the business is selling it.
- Ekaros 5mo agoLot of online presence seems to be tied to consumerism. That is consuming anything, more ostentatious the better. This is just specific digital version of that.
- comboy 5mo agoworth mentioning that openai hired him some time ago
- oefrha 5mo ago[dead]
- zxornand 5mo agoAnd was he 5x more productive in those 30d than a years worth of a dev making 200k/yr? Doubtful lol, dudes killing the environment just for fun at this point.
- vessenes 5mo agoIf you review the openclaw release schedule and code output you will see that yes, he was. I’m not saying you’ll like what you see, but the openclaw release schedule is well faster than human ability to assess it.
- SecretDreams 5mo agoThat's a metric for management to pump AI if I've ever seen one.
- rowanG077 5mo agoIt's fast for sure. But not 5 years of dev time compressed into 30 days fast.
- Philip-J-Fry 5mo agoWith a lot of these AI tools yea, they release very often. But half the features they add aren't even that useful. They just add shit because they can and they introduce bugs and change behaviour all the time. Opencode has the same problems. They often do multiple releases of that app a day, yet within the span of a week or two I have had to update my config because some random change has altered the behaviour and my permissions broke. Or I've noticed the way the app renders is suddenly different. Yet, my day to day usage has barely changed since the version I installed last year. It's like everything changes but nothing changes.
- freedomben 5mo agoEven claude code has this happen, though perhaps to a lesser extent. I'm getting really tired of having new bugs pop up on me or subtle behavior change near daily that requires me to change things. The most annoying thing ever that was just introduced is a giant spew of context mode crap that Claude aggressively adds to every CLAUDE.md file, and I can't find a way to turn it off. I just have to `git checkout CLAUDE.md` repeatedely right now. If I have to add a bash alias to work around your annoying bug, that's pretty bad.
- 5mo ago
- thomasahle 5mo agoHe used 600B tokens in 30 days. I use more than 150B/month with just 15 codex accounts. 60 accounts is "just" $12,000/month. So Peter could "save" 100x by using monthly accounts. Of course, he doesn't have to, as he works at OpenAI now.
- MadxX79 5mo agoSounds like a healthy industry, selling tokens at 1000x below cost.
- SecretDreams 5mo agoIt's to build a moat, of course! Narrator: there was no moat
- wolttam 5mo agoAPI pricing isn’t cost, we don’t know what cost is.
- impulser_ 5mo agoI would bet money Anthropic and OpenAI are actually profitable on inference. The problem is they have to spend large sums of money to train models that are essentially worthless after a few months.
- Leynos 5mo agoA large part of the GPT-5.x model iteration has been about making training more affordable and token efficient.
- AussieWog93 5mo agoDario explicitly stated this in an interview. They make more money from inference than they do training the model, but then the next model gets so much more expensive to train so their annual figures have been in the red.
- 5mo ago
- tom1337890 5mo agoAfter trying openclaw a bit myself, no wonder. Without the best models, capabilities drop significantly. And I guess he has a lot of automations and stuff, which explains the 19'000 daily spend. I hit my personal spend limit when it cost like 40 USD to get Google auth tokens working. Which is very complicated when you run openclaw on a vps. And it even broke like a week after. Maybe one could justify the 40usd if it would save my time instead. But I was babysitting openclaw doing it anyhow. So I actually double spend. Money plus time. Btw, same frustration for me setting up signal, Whatsapp or slack...
- vessenes 5mo agoIt’s a moving target for sure. I’m excited for the LTS release series - keeping up with twice or three times weekly releases is not for humans :)
- boesboes 5mo agoHe should be brought to the hague XD
- pixl97 5mo agoWhy just him, and not every other user on HN that has said things like. "Programmers don't need unions or professional standards, it will stand in our way of making as much money as we can, and will slow down the speed of software development". With that said, HN does provide the tools to find users that said things like this and if I wasn't lazy I'd love to find at least a few that said things like the above, but are now pearl clutching over AI being bad they are going to crush the things down to singularities.
- wiseowise 5mo agoWhat a clown. And Twitter bozos will cheer and clap. As far as money spent, this is still much better than rounding up and/or bombing brown people, but shows insanity of the current market. The saddest part is that bootlickers/temporarily embarrassed AI millionaires will defend this. And of course I'm just yet another envious hater from "the orange website". Your conscience is clear, AI bros. /s
- MadxX79 5mo ago[dead]
- athrow 5mo agoWhat does he have to show for it?
- Philip-J-Fry 5mo agoSo he's spent $20k in one day. There's not a chance in hell he's actually doing productive work with all these tokens. Grifters gonna grift. What a state of affairs.
- malshe 5mo agoCome on, he is very productive on twitter /s
- Ekaros 5mo agoAt this point token spend is in itself the product. Hopefully eventually we will go back to evaluating the output. Not that I am very hopeful that we learn to do it in sensible way.
- throwa356262 5mo agoI bet you that if openclaw had better context management or could correctly switch to cheaper models for simpler jobs that number would be much lower.
- Nzen 5mo agotl;dr Peter Steinberger shared a product demo for CodexBar [0] with a graph of OpenAI token usage. This graph shows one million spent, prefers gpt-5.5 and spent twenty thousand today. [0] https://github.com/steipete/CodexBar https://github.com/steipete/CodexBar However, I do not see a strong reason to believe that this is his actual, personal usage. It could be all openclaw usage or some subset of openai usage, given that he is inside them. I suspect it is far more likely to be fake data [1] that exercises the graph library in a visually satisfying way. Notice that it has no usage for a 'week' after April 15 (a Wednesday), but picks up a bunch later. As marketing copy it needn't have any basis in reality [2]. I should hope openai would put a procedure in front of their entrepreneur acquisition that prevents accidentally exposing trade secrets [3]. [1] https://github.com/faker-js/faker https://github.com/faker-js/faker [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/proceduralgeneration/comments/lf2n4f/my_friend_and_i_made_a_procedural_stock_price/ https://www.reddit.com/r/proceduralgeneration/comments/lf2n4... [3] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PostingWhatYouShouldnt https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PostingWhatYouSh...
- christoph 5mo agoI view this type of post (his, not yours) as meta deception. I only became aware of this type of deception and its power from a bit of reading in to magicians and stage craft in the last few months. There’s a video on YouTube as well that does a great job of breaking down a Derren Brown stunt that uses it to great effect manipulating the TV viewing audience. I’d actually seen the original DB episode years before when it first aired and it definitely had an affect on me through this form of manipulation - it altered my internal understanding of marketing/advertising, which was the actual underlying purpose of the episode. It’s altered how I internally accept and process information from any 2nd or 3rd hand source. BTW, people aren’t necessarily always aware they’re doing it. We all suffer from our own internal biases and deceptions, and sometimes we spread them unknowingly!
- WickyNilliams 5mo agoCould you link to the video?
- Tiberium 5mo agoThis is quite a misleading title because this is the raw API cost, but he (obviously) has unlimited usage as an OpenAI employee. Moreover, if you use e.g. the $200 Codex sub, you get about ~$5k-$6k monthly API usage if you spend every week of your usage, if not more, which shows that the raw API cost is not how much it (likely) costs to OpenAI, unless they're subsidizing all this. He did clarify that it was with fast mode. Without fast mode it'd "only" be $300k in raw API cost, or ~60 $200 Codex subscriptions.
- rvz 5mo agoBut even going with the $5k - $6k monthly usage on a $200 codex subscription even going over their limits is also unrealistic in the long term and that is just ONE person. Lets say I was at the casino and was spending a lot on casino chips but I also happen to work at the casino. I'm not really losing money whether if I win / lose since I'm using the houses money and there's little risk involved on every dice roll or press of the button. The risk is far higher if I don't have that level of access and continue to spend the same amount of money on lots of tokens (or casino chips, spins or button presses.) The same is true here with these agents. Some companies will realize that they can no longer afford to spend millions a month on tokens or even startups spending $5k - $6k per person per month on tokens. I can only see local efficient models making sense on recovering from this unnecessary spending or even light gambling on tokens.
- Terretta 5mo agoEven at unlimited budget, there is a crossover where outsourcing thinking to the machine costs more than the machine. What I mean by this: 1. Intern, analyst, junior, or offshore level coding is cheaper when done by the machine. // Side note: There is good reason the industry invests in suboptimal output from this set which moves to the "cost" column when using an LLM, but nobody's accounting for that. 2. For the interns, analysts, junior, or offshoring to do the right thing costs a multiple of the coding effort: the PdM/PjM stuff of course, but also the Stakeholder, Product Owner, Architect, Principal Engineer, QA, and SRE stuff. 3. If you are not a principal or staff engineer level engineer, you are likely unqualified to catch and fix the errors LLMs make across engineering, much less these other PDLC (product development lifecycle, which includes SDLC and SRE) loop. 4. For LLM output to be useful, your 'harness' has to incorporate all of that as well, which because it's so much harder than transliterating spec-to-code, balloons tokens exponentially. 5. Today it is faster, more efficient, and costs less, to work with LLMs "XP" (eXtreme Programming) style, pairing with the LLM actively co-creating and co-reviewing, steering for more effective turns. So, your options are: - ship garbage while costing less than a median first world SWE - pair with the LLM actively for the benefits of XP - add enough harness and steering the LLM costs more than SWEs, and still needs a human loop “move fast and break things to find out what's broken” style I would expect that within a couple years, these other disciplines can be baked in enough the machine costs less for everything but surprises.
- faangguyindia 5mo agohow many of those tokens were spent to buy fake stars using fake email signups?
- malshe 5mo agoAI bros love hyping about their insanely inefficient token usage. It's become some sort of a dick-measuring contest. And if you work for OpenAI, of course you can claim insane measurements. Just last week I saw a dude boasting about how they used their $20/month ChatGPT subscription to earn $15 (or similar trivial amount) in a bug bounty by running the model the whole day. Sam Altman replied to that tweet but not entirely positively. OpenAI has been removing limits on token usage to take on Anthropic but I'm sure most of the users they are acquiring are these AI bros who are burning tokens for the sake of it. Massive price hikes are coming after OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs probably an order of magnitude larger than what happened to ride sharing.
- vslira 5mo agoRegardless of one’s opinion about AI, from a product perspective this seems somewhat similar to the dev using his 48gb ram machine and latest iphone to test an app that will be used by consumers with entry-level devices
- Terretta 5mo agoThe mentioned menu bar app is a MITM (man in the middle) and rightly discloses that it gets all your session creds and uses them, along with keychain and full disk access: Privacy: Reuses existing provider sessions — OAuth, device flow, API keys, browser cookies, local files — so no passwords are stored. macOS permissions: Full Disk Access for Safari cookies, Keychain access for cookie decryption and OAuth flows... It's excellent this is disclosed as a reminder of how things work and the tradeoffs you're making to use it.
- hansmayer 5mo agoWhat product or feature did he build with it and how much ARR did it generate for OpenAI?
- lofaszvanitt 5mo agoMarketing
- fg137 5mo agoI mean, it's OpenAI. If you look at what happened with Sora, you know none of this matters. Just wait till this OpenClaw thing is over.
- jdw64 5mo ago[dead]
- 0gs 5mo agoyou have to admit: he is not as difficult to project paratechnical admiration onto as sama is. maybe the board wants him to be the next ceo
- Robdel12 5mo agoOnce you see how much crap they’re running to police the agents on the repo, you’ll ‘get’ the spend https://x.com/steipete/status/2055405041843052792 https://x.com/steipete/status/2055405041843052792 I won’t lie, if I had the access to this, I’d do the same exact thing.
- tedggh 5mo agoSame mindset as Marc Andreessen when working on Mosaic: Design for infinite (Internet) bandwidth.
- lxgr 5mo agoThat’s an excellent way to lose to your competitor that knows and respects your users’ resource constraints.
- danpalmer 5mo ago"All that automation allows us to run extremely lean" He has a different opinion of what it means to be lean than almost everyone else. That's fine, he's allowed to, but it's something you have to understand to make sense of any of his comments on things. He has a radically different set of values to most people.
- vntok 5mo agoHis team is basically him and two other humans, powering an ambitious well-known project so successful an industry titan ended up acquihiring him/them. That's pretty lean, no?
- wolttam 5mo agoNobody here talking about what this represents for demand on these models, if these numbers aren’t made up. One person using 600B tokens in a month. The most I’ve hit is around 500M tokens and I thought that was a huge amount. We’re going to have some major compute shortages for a while
- voidfunc 5mo ago500m tokens is easy... I'm burning about 2b a week.
- onion2k 5mo agoJensen Huang was saying humanity is going to need 1000x the current energy production in the future. He might not be wrong.
- amunozo 5mo agoOr more probably, he will be wrong. We really need to stop amplifying marketing statements like the bullshit Huang and Amodei tell all the time. There's no much thought behind them, just marketing and wishes.
- bigstrat2003 5mo ago
- yodakohl 5mo agoYou can look at the output here https://github.com/steipete https://github.com/steipete Sample commit from 5 minutes ago https://github.com/openclaw/crabbox/pull/113 https://github.com/openclaw/crabbox/pull/113 May 2026: 8,826 commits in 94 repositories
- maleldil 5mo agoHe has tests asserting that the output HTML contains specific JS code as strings? What??
- myaccount1337 5mo ago[dead]
- lofaszvanitt 5mo agoThe OpenClown.
- k3y5 5mo ago[dead]
- ExTv 5mo agothank god im broke lol i built my personal app mostly with ollama and it’s been smooth sailing so far. basically openclaw + hermes-style agents running on android phones, and the stuff it can do is kinda insane
- throwatdem12311 5mo agoGood for him…?! Who gives a shit. OpenClaw is garbage.
- 12arwlaz 5mo agoSo that is $15.6 million in a year. You could get a decent application for that instead of broken slop if you spend it on human salaries.
- mekael 5mo agoI’ve worked for companies with less than that in total personnel expenditures (100ish people) and they were actually economically productive / provided a tangible service. With 15 million and a year(ish) I could spin up dedicated teams to build multiple profitable applications. That sounds like hubris, and maybe it is, but i’m pretty confident given my domain knowledge. Has everyone gone crazy?
- iejwjw 5mo agoYes they’ve gone crazy :) Cool heads will prevail
- zxornand 5mo agoI fear our industry has become a circus, even more than it previously was.
- xbar 5mo ago100x engineers.
- clearstack 5mo agothe real story is upstream — NVDA has >70% gross margins on the chips powering these tokens. cost drops, margins dont.
- steve1977 5mo agoAnd what did he create with it?
- mattbrewsbytes 5mo agoIn the dot com boom there were companies spending like $100+ on ads per $1 of revenue. The cost of customer acquisition was insanely high because of the hype of ecommerce and it was being subsidized by VC and IPO's. This AI boom feels similar, a lot of hype and the AI usage costs are being subsidized by private equity/VC so far. IPO's are supposed to happen this fall for OpenAI and Anthropic. They're going to have to face the music of corporate governance, accounting rules, reporting revenue, earnings, etc. Subsidizing users seems unsustainable, they need to either jack up rates or downgrade usage per plans. Then there is the circular investments between all of them and Google, Microsoft, etc. Seems like a house of cards.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- RyanZhuuuu 5mo ago[flagged]
- irthomasthomas 5mo ago[flagged]
- nlawalker 5mo agoIt’s hilarious to me, seeing that one of the most fundamental challenges and frustrations of the profession of software development is the inability of management to meaningfully measure productivity and resorting to proxy measures, that a huge and vocal community of software developers have themselves become focused on a metric that maps directly to dollars spent.
- wilkystyle 5mo agoWas already astounded that after decades of universally agreeing that number of lines of code is a terrible metric for software engineering productivity, devs are now using it as the proof that agentic software development is the future. Can't wrap my head around how lighting money on fire is now apparently something to maximize [0]. [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1teswot/peakaistartupculture/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1teswot/pe...
- Alex_L_Wood 5mo agoNot only we are looping, we are also adding layers of Idiocracy upon each loop. I kinda envy retired software engineers now, they can just grab the popcorn and watch this dumpster fire without a worry.
- cyanydeez 5mo agoat this point capitalism has created its circular economy without providing any benefit to it's surrounding. In this specific case it's closer to a human centipede of circular funding.
- laksgandikota 5mo agoWe could have hired 5 human engineers and they would never forget the context for the rest of their lives.
- BetterThanSober 5mo ago[dead]
- vivekchand19 5mo ago[flagged]
- InvOfSmallC 5mo agoand yet openclaw has bugs like there's no tomorrow
- isodev 5mo agoThis is ridiculous, and what do you have to show for $1.3M? So many sustainable projects that can meaningfully improve the planet with even half that funding and he is just converting water and cash to CO2. The scope of the waste is so fucked up, criminal even.