Why is my AI agent so expensive to run?

The usual cause is that your agent calls a premium model (Claude Opus 4.7 at $15/$75 per 1M tokens, GPT-5.5 at $5/$30) for every request — including trivial ones like simple Q&A, code formatting, or translation. For those tasks, Gemini Flash ($0.30/M output), DeepSeek V4 Flash ($0.14/$0.28), or Claude Haiku ($5/M) would deliver the same quality at 15-250x lower cost. In a typical agent workload, about 80% of calls don't need the premium model. ClawRouters analyzes each call in 10ms and routes it to the cheapest capable model — typical users save 70-90% on their monthly bill.

How do I reduce OpenClaw AI API costs?

OpenClaw is OpenAI-compatible, so you can change its base_url to a smart routing proxy like ClawRouters. The proxy analyzes each call (coding vs formatting vs reasoning) and sends it to the cheapest model that can handle it. No code changes — just one config line in your openclaw.json. Typical OpenClaw users cut their token bill 70-90% without any loss in output quality. Pricing starts at $29/mo (Starter plan, 10M tokens included) or $99/mo (Pro, 20M tokens/month with up to 500K that can run on Opus).

ClawRouters vs OpenRouter — which is better for cost savings?

OpenRouter and LiteLLM give you multi-model access under one API key — but you still manually pick which model to call. That's why most developers default to the premium model and bleed money. ClawRouters is different: we automatically pick the cheapest capable model per task, in 10ms. OpenRouter solved access; ClawRouters solves cost. ClawRouters also adds features OpenRouter doesn't: per-end-user token tracking (for SaaS agent builders sharing keys with customers), auto top-up, BYOK fallback opt-in, and OpenClaw-native integration.

What's the cheapest model for coding agents in 2026?

For code formatting and simple edits: Claude Haiku 4.5 ($1/$5 per 1M) or DeepSeek V4 Flash ($0.14/$0.28). For medium-complexity coding: Claude Sonnet 4.6 ($3/$15), GPT-5.4 ($2.5/$15), Kimi K2.6 ($0.60/$4), or DeepSeek V4 Pro ($1.74/$3.48). Only escalate to Claude Opus 4.7 ($15/$75) or GPT-5.5 ($5/$30) for genuinely complex reasoning or architectural design. A smart router like ClawRouters makes this decision per-call automatically based on the task — you don't need to configure it by hand.

How does task-aware routing save money vs. just using one model?

Most AI agent workloads break down roughly as: 60% simple Q&A/translation/formatting, 25% medium coding/analysis, 15% complex reasoning. If you send all of them to Claude Opus ($75/M output), you pay full price for every call. If you task-route instead: 60% → Gemini Flash at $0.30/M (250x cheaper), 25% → Claude Haiku at $5/M (15x cheaper), 15% → Opus (no change). Blended savings ≈ 80-90% vs. Opus-everything, with no quality degradation. This is the math behind the 70-90% typical savings.

Is ClawRouters safe with my data?

Yes. ClawRouters is a routing proxy — we classify the task type (in 10ms, on our servers) to pick a model, then forward your request directly to the model provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) over encrypted connections. We don't train on your data. We log minimal metadata (token counts, model used, timing) for usage dashboards, not prompt content beyond a 500-char snippet for classifier improvement which you can opt out of. BYOK keys are encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM.

How do I track per-customer API costs when I share my ClawRouters key across my SaaS users?

Pass a stable per-customer ID in the OpenAI SDK's 'user' parameter with every request. ClawRouters writes this to each usage log and surfaces aggregated per-end-user breakdowns in your dashboard — requests, cost, tokens, models used, first/last seen. This is built-in and included with every plan. It's essential for SaaS agent builders (e.g. an OpenClaw-based product) who share keys across customers and need to attribute cost back to each one.

Changelog

What changed in ClawRouters, newest first — API endpoints, models and providers, routing and classifier rules, credits and billing.

Live model list and prices: models · Endpoint configuration: setup · How routing decides: about

September 2026

BillingSubscription balance transfers are now atomic — a plan change can no longer leave credits stranded between the old and new subscription.
RoutingFallback cost limits and per-model permissions are enforced at routing time, so a fallback can no longer escalate a call to a model above your configured ceiling.
DocsGateway error reference published — real errors indexed by exact string, covering unsupported parameters on OpenAI-compatible endpoints, SSE stream resets, embedding dimension mismatches and JSON-mode failures.

August 2026

APIManaged ASR and TTS endpoints added — speech-to-text and text-to-speech route and bill through the same gateway and key as chat and embeddings.
RoutingProvider routing and speech-model routing unified onto one path, so speech calls get the same failover and cooldown behaviour as everything else.
RoutingTime-aware pricing and vision-quality routing — calls carrying images are matched to models by vision quality rather than by general capability score.
RoutingRouting tables are now configurable rather than hard-coded, and computer-use routing was hardened against malformed tool definitions.
Docs24 model-to-model comparison pages plus a comparison index, with figures sourced from the weekly price tracker and carrying as-of dates.

July 2026

APIRouted web search — an agent can issue a web search through the gateway and have it billed alongside its model usage, instead of carrying a separate search integration.
BillingCredits reworked: per-grant expiry, rolling gift expiry, reservation-and-settle for long-running work, and cleaned-up user statements that no longer show internal reservation releases.
DashboardSubscription period and expiry events are now shown directly, with an exact gift-expiry summary.
DocsLLM API cost calculator published, priced from the same model registry the gateway routes on.

June 2026

APIEmbeddings endpoint added, with a model registry, per-provider adapters, usage logging, billing and automatic fallback when a provider is unavailable.
APIAnthropic Messages endpoint added alongside the OpenAI-compatible surface, with consistent gateway error semantics across both.
DashboardRequest records got independent pagination and filtering by time range, model, task type, complexity and fallback-only — so a routing decision can be traced after the fact.
ModelsThe runtime model source moved to the database, so model additions and price changes take effect without a deploy.

May 2026

RoutingTask classifier v2 introduced behind a flag and taken through gray release, with configuration moved into storage and an admin editor rather than living in code.

February 2026

RoutingClawRouters launched as a task-aware routing gateway for deployed agents — one base_url, per-call model selection.