Comment by TheDong
9 hours ago
I find some value as kinda a better alexa.
I have it hooked up to my smart home stuff, like my speaker and smart lights and TV, and I've given it various skills to talk to those things.
I can message it "Play my X playlist" or "Give me the gorillaz song I was listening to yesterday"
I can also message it "Download Titanic to my jellyfin server and queue it up", and it'll go straight to the pirate bay.
It having a browser and the ability to run cli tools, and also understand English well enough to know that "Give me some Beatles" means to use its audio skill, means it's a vastly better alexa
It only costs me like $180 a month in API credits (now that they banned using the max plan), so seems okay still.
> It only costs me like $180 a month in API credits (now that they banned using the max plan), so seems okay still.
I have a hard time imagining how much better Alexa would have to be for me to spend $180/month on it...
Just to clarify to people focusing on the $180/month price tag.
OpenClaw is not a CC-only product. You can configure it to use any API endpoint.
Paying $180/month to Anthropic is a personal choice, not a requirement to use OpenClaw.
So that leads to a question: Is there a physical box I could buy that an amortize over 5-7 years to be half the API cost?
In other words, assuming no price increase, 7 years of that pricing is $15k. Is there hardware I could buy for $7k or less that would be able to replace those API calls or alternativr subs entirely?
I've personally been trying to determine if I should buy a new GC on my aging desktop(s), since their graphic cards can't really handle LLMs)
17 replies →
I mean, I'm getting $180/mo worth of fun out of playing with it and figuring out what it can do that it's worth it.
Like, no one bats an eye at all the people paying $100/mo for Hulu + Live TV, or paying $350/mo for virtual pixels in candy crush / pokemon go / whatever, and I'm having at least that much fun in playing with openclaw.
Everyone in my circle would seriously bat an eye at all those numbers. Congrats on making it to the upper class.
1 reply →
Just for reference: I pay 8€ for mobile, 40€ for internet and some occasional 5€ for VPNs each month. That's all the digital service subscriptions I'll need to have fun.
I think paying $180/month because you don't want to walk 10 feet to a light switch or forgot the name of a 25 yo Gorillaz song you just heard is absurdly stupid.
You could be doing for ALOT cheaper using something like minimax m2.7 for subagents. You dont need to be throwing all that cash out the door.
I think quite a lot of people would bat an eyelid at those things.
If any of my friends admitted to spending $350/mo on candy crush i'd think that they'd badly need help for a gambling problem.
What are you using it for, seriously?
The things I want to use it for (like gathering weekly reports across a half dozen brokerage and bank accounts) are not things I'd trust it to do.
I do see how a very busy businessman or a venture capitalist would gladly pay 180$/month to offload chores and mundane work from his schedule. That comes down to 6$/month, which probably matches his monthly coffee budget.
Chores, yes. If there was a $180/month where ALL my families chores could be accomplished, I'd consider it.
That means picking up and cleaning the house after 3 kids and a dog. Grocery shopping. Dishes. Laundry. Chores.
Tech crap? Nope.
6 replies →
> It only costs me like $180 a month in API credits
In The Netherlands you can get a live-in au-pair from the Philippines for less than that. She will happily play your Beatles song, download the Titanic movie for you, find your Gorillaz song and even cook and take care of your children.
It's horrible that we have such human exploitation in 2026, but it does put into perspective how much those credits are if you can get a real-life person doing those tasks for less.
I'm surprised to read that. Here in the UK, having a live-in au pair doesn't excuse you from paying the minimum wage for all the hours that they're working (approx $2300/month for a 35 hour week). You can deduct an amount to account for the fact that you're providing accomodation but it's strictly limited (approx $400/month).
The Netherlands has a weird and exploitative setup where you can classify your au pair as a "cultural exchange", and then pay them literal peanuts (room and board plus a token amount of "pocket money")
1 reply →
From what I can see online, the average compensation that an au-pair in The Netherlands receives is 300 euro per month, with living expenses being covered by the family. There is no minimum wage requirement for au-pairs like in the UK or the US.
7 replies →
[dead]
We shouldn't have to "import" people from poorer countries to do the mundane tasks we got too lazy to do ourselves.
The concept of having this kind of help is totally foreign to me, but with the exception of one, every family I’ve encountered that had an au pair have been two very busy high earning parents, neither of them lazy. I think you could argue that perhaps priorities have been misplaced, but not lazy.
Surely that’s subsidized?
A lot of people in the Silicon Valley area spend that much ($6/day) on coffee. What they don’t realize is how out of touch they are in thinking makes sense for the rest of the fucking world. $180/mo is about 5% of the median US per capita income. It’s not going to pick your kids up from school, do your taxes, fix your car, or do the dishes. It’s going to download movies and call restaurants and play music. It’s a hobby, high-touch leisure assistant that costs a lot of money.
They aren't selling it to the median US earner. They're selling it (and trying to generate FOMO) to the out of touch people so that it becomes so entrenched that the median earner will be forced to use it in some capacity through their interaction with businesses, schools, the government, etc.
1 reply →
Realistically you certainly don’t Anthropic’s models for those things and can get something for a fraction of the price on OpenRouter/etc.
Wow. I'd expect that from Singapore or UAE but finding it happen in a fairly developed Western country is a surprise.
Machines don't get tired, don't have to sleep, don't face principal-agent problems and can accumulate Skill.md instructions for decades without getting replaced. I definitely see the potential of something like OpenClaw for those who can afford it.
You're paying the au pair partly in accommodation, food, bills and a visa. The visa isn't coming out of your bank account, but it's definitely part of the incentive, so you could see it as a government subsidy.
For comparison, a full time "virtual assistant" with fluent English from the Philippines costs upwards of $700/month nowadays.
> In The Netherlands you can get a live-in au-pair from the Philippines for less than that
What a horrible situation.
How is that remotely possible without committing enormous violations of labor law?
Framed this way - then “replacing” this kind of human exploitation is definitely a good for humanity. If someone doing a job is practically a slave, then replacing them with an electron to token converter is a good thing.
The number one goal of AI should be to eliminate human exploitation. We want robots mining the minerals we use for our phones, not children. We should strive to free all of humanity from dangerous labour and the need for such jobs to exist.
If Elon Musk wants Optimus robots to help colonize Mars shouldn’t he be trying to create robots that can mine cobalt or similar minerals from dangerous mines and such?
> The number one goal of AI should be to eliminate human exploitation.
I have some bad news.
I doubt this is true in .nl. 180 a month is low for a live-in au-pair.
> In The Netherlands you can get a live-in au-pair from the Philippines for less than that.
And you see nothing wrong with that?
I don't want to be judgemental, but I do find it funny that you're paying $180 for this convenience, and use it to pirate movies.
Then allow me to be judgemental in your stead. I've done a similar setup as the above and completely locally. I dunno how they're paying so much, but that's ridiculously overpriced.
All the other models performed much worse for the skills I'm using. I tried gpt-5.1 (and then 5.4 again recently), and also tried pointing it at OpenRouter and using a few of the cheaper models, and all of them added too much friction for me.
Be judgemental all you want, but I feel like I'm paying for less friction, and also more security since my experiments also showed claude to be the least vulnerable to prompt injection attempts.
1 reply →
It's not the only thing they're doing with it. I mean, the logic is sound - $180 goes into automating bunch of manual processes in personal life, one of which is getting movies, which in some cases involves going out on the high seas.
Let's also point out the $180 is going to a hideously evil AI company which pirated millions of books and movies.
180 grand a month for PA is a lot of money. But I guess each person has its own priority. I mean, I can pay a very fancy gym with that price instead of the shitty popular one I go, which would probably improve my well being much more than asking to play Gorillaz
"a grand" means a thousand (dollars or pounds or whatever). $180k / month really would be a lot of money. I'd be your PA for that!
ok, now I wish there was an edit button. Thanks for noticing the mistake though
Am I right to be a little concerned by the phrase "it'll go straight to the pirate bay"?
Not to be a narc or anything, but is OpenClaw liable to just perform illegal acts on your behalf just because it seemed like that's what you meant for it to do?
Seems like the only people using pirate bay in 2026 are "privacy obsessed" rich middle-aged guys.
I think they do it mostly to feel young and edgy.
I use it to get media for my family to watch on any tv using Plex. Sometimes I get books/manuals etc.
> Not to be a narc or anything, but is OpenClaw liable to just perform illegal acts on your behalf just because it seemed like that's what you meant for it to do?
There's at least a couple of dozen instances right now, somewhere, getting very close to designing boutique chemical weapons.
180$/month to queue playlists does not “seem okay” at all. We must be living in different worlds.
> I can message it "Play my X playlist"
People do this? Or is it some sort of joke way above my head?
In what bizarre world is it easier to ask a massive LLM to play a playlist rather than ... literally hitting the play key on it?
You're spendin 180 a month on tokens and still refusing to buy media like Titanic?
If you've figured out how to pirate Anthropic's models and enough GPUs to run it for less than my API costs, I'm all ears
While I love the idea of using it for home/personal automation (and it sounds like you've done a good job executing it), this comment makes it seem like avoiding paying for The Titanic is almost as important as having an OpenClaw-driven assistant/automation system.
> "Download Titanic to my jellyfin server and queue it up", and it'll go straight to the pirate bay
You could build up a legitimate collection for much less than $180/mo.
I have the almost same thing using a network connected raspberry-pi and no AI.
Using OpenClaw for that is nuts. Claude or GPT could just one shot an app for you that does all that and uses 0 tokens once you've built it.
Regarding Alexa, none of those use cases sound that useful to have an ever-present listening device at home, except if one is bedbound or something.
[dead]