My AI Assistant Was Burning $114 a Day. It Found the Problem Itself.
Originally posted on X — view the original post.
My AI assistant was burning $114 a day. I had no idea until it built its own cost tracker.
I gave it access to the billing API and told it to find where the money went. It caught something I never would have: 76% of costs weren’t from actual work. They were overhead from how often my automated tasks ran.
27 scheduled jobs, firing 156 times a day. Each run loaded the full conversation history, even for a 2-second check. The API charges for that loading step whether the task does anything useful or not.
One afternoon to fix. Consolidated 27 jobs to 15, batched related tasks, cut daily runs from 156 to 17. Monthly savings: $360.
I wouldn’t have connected billing data to the pricing model myself. My assistant read the docs, cross-referenced spending patterns, and handed me a specific plan.
OpenClaw is the open-source platform that makes this kind of always-on AI assistant possible. I teach a class on setting up and getting the most from OpenClaw — details at themeperks.com/openclaw-course/.
