

The common clay of the new west:


transcription
Twitter post from @BenjaminDEKR
“OpenClaw is interesting, but will also drain your wallet if you aren’t careful. Last night around midnight I loaded my Anthropic API account with $20, then went to bed. When I woke up, my Anthropic balance was $O. Opus was checking “is it daytime yet?” every 30 minutes, paying $0.75 each time to conclude “no, it’s still night.” Doing literally nothing, OpenClaw spent the entire balance. How? The “Heartbeat” cron job, even though literally the only thing I had going was one silly reminder, (“remind me tomorrow to get milk”)”
Continuation of twitter post
“1. Sent ~120,000 tokens of context to Opus 4.5 2. Opus read HEARTBEAT md, thought about reminders 3. Replied “HEARTBEAT_OK” 4. Cost: ~$0.75 per heartbeat (cache writes) The damage:
- Overnight = ~25+ heartbeats
- 25 × $0.75 = ~$18.75 just from heartbeats alone
- Plus regular conversation = ~$20 total The absurdity: Opus was essentially checking “is it daytime yet?” every 30 minutes, paying $0.75 each time to conclude “no, it’s still night.” The problem is:
- Heartbeat uses Opus (most expensive model) for a trivial check
- Sends the entire conversation context (~120k tokens) each time
- Runs every 30 minutes regardless of whether anything needs checking That’s $750 a month if this runs, to occasionally remind me stuff? Yeah, no. Not great.”

They think it’s just that they’re early, like they did with bitcoin. Maybe in six monthsthe dogshit will start to taste great, who’s to say, and so on and so forth.
Also swengs in the USA often make absurdly more than 1K/week.