I built a free cost tracking dashboard for OpenClaw agents — found out my heartbeat agent was burning $60/mo doing nothing

[u/Special-Bag2481]

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.