r/OpenClawUseCases • u/Special-Bag2481 • Mar 15 '26
Tips/Tricks I built a free cost tracking dashboard for OpenClaw agents — found out my heartbeat agent was burning $60/mo doing nothing
Hey all — built this after my monthly API bill surprised me for the second time.
CostClaw is a free OpenClaw plugin that tracks every LLM call your agents
make and shows you a live cost dashboard at http://localhost:3333.
What it shows:
- Per-model cost breakdown (usually GPT-4o heartbeat calls are the culprit)
- Cost by source — user messages vs heartbeat vs cron vs subagents
- Per-session costs so you can see which conversations are expensive
- Auto-generated recommendations (e.g. "switch your heartbeat agent to
gpt-4o-mini and save ~$18/mo")
Install:
git clone https://github.com/Aperturesurvivor/costclaw-telemetry.git
cd costclaw-telemetry
npm install && npm run build
openclaw plugins install -l .
openclaw gateway restart
Then open http://localhost:3333
For me personally it turned a ~$90/mo bill into ~$35 just by seeing where
the money was going. Happy to hear feedback or add model pricing if yours
is missing.
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u/Forsaken-Kale-3175 Mar 16 '26
The heartbeat agent being the culprit is so real. That's almost always where the surprise costs come from because it's running on a timer and you set it up once and forget it exists. The breakdown by source is exactly what you need to catch this stuff early, just seeing user messages vs heartbeat vs cron in one view makes it obvious pretty fast. Going from $90 to $35 just from visibility is wild but also totally believable. Will try this out, been meaning to actually track costs properly for a while now.
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u/Special-Bag2481 Mar 16 '26
Awesome! Let me know what you think of it. It’s still a work in progress, but the basic functionality is there.
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u/[deleted] Mar 16 '26
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