Cut Your OpenClaw Running Costs by 90%
One setting change. Your heartbeat model is probably burning money it doesn't need to. Here's the fix.
The problem
OpenClaw's heartbeat runs every few minutes, checking in on your tasks, health-checking sites, and extracting facts from conversations. It's one of the most powerful features — but if you're running it on Claude Sonnet or GPT-4, you're paying premium model prices for what is essentially a checklist runner.
Claude Sonnet costs around $3/1M input tokens and $15/1M output tokens. Gemini 2.5 Flash costs a fraction of that — roughly $0.15/1M input and $0.60/1M output. That's a 10–20x difference for a task that doesn't need frontier model intelligence.
The fix: one command
Open your terminal and run:
openclaw cron edit <your-heartbeat-id> --model google/gemini-2.5-flashDon't know your heartbeat ID? Run openclaw cron list first — it'll show all your scheduled jobs with their IDs.
Or, if you haven't set up a heartbeat yet:
openclaw cron add \
--name heartbeat \
--every 10m \
--session isolated \
--message "Run HEARTBEAT.md" \
--model google/gemini-2.5-flash \
--announceWhat about quality?
Heartbeat tasks are structured, predictable work: check a list, log some notes, run a health check. Gemini Flash handles this just fine. You're not asking it to reason through a complex architecture decision — you're asking it to read a markdown checklist and execute it.
Save your expensive model budget for actual conversations and complex agent tasks. The heartbeat doesn't need it.
How much will you save?
Running a heartbeat every 10 minutes means roughly 144 runs per day. Each run typically uses 15,000–25,000 tokens (mostly cache reads). Over a month:
- Claude Sonnet: ~$15–25/month just for heartbeats
- Gemini 2.5 Flash: ~$1–2/month
That's $13–23/month saved. Across a year, that's real money.
The one thing to watch
If your heartbeat uses complex skills or does multi-step reasoning, you might notice slightly less reliable output. In that case, try google/gemini-2.5-pro as a middle ground — still significantly cheaper than Claude Sonnet, but more capable than Flash.
Want a pre-built heartbeat setup?
If you want a complete CEO-style heartbeat that tracks your daily plan, monitors active tasks, and extracts facts automatically — check out our skills and personas on ClawMart.
Browse ClawMart →