sooo I set up OpenClaw this weekend and made the rookie mistake of running everything through Claude Opus.
$75+ a day just chatting with the thing.
Then I realized most of what I was asking it didn't actually need the smartest model.
So I set up model routing instead: Gemini Flash for everyday stuff, Sonnet for writing, Opus only for complex builds.
If you're using one model for everything, try splitting by task complexity.
My daily cost dropped to about $5 overnight.
Literally just tell OpenClaw to set this up for you.