Cheapest Models to Run OpenClaw in 2026: The Complete Cost Guide

OpenClaw has become the go-to open-source AI coding agent — 250K+ GitHub stars, 1.5M weekly npm downloads, and a 100K+ Discord community. But there’s an open secret: most people are overpaying for the models that power it.

GPT-4o costs $2.50/$10.00 per million tokens. Claude 3.5 Sonnet costs $3.00/$15.00. A heavy coding day can run $10–25 — and that adds up to $200–500/month if you use OpenClaw as your primary coding tool.

Here’s the thing: Chinese AI models now match or beat these benchmarks at 5–25x lower cost. And with NovAI, you can access all of them through one OpenAI-compatible API — no Chinese phone number, no VPN, no Aliyun account.

This guide ranks every model you can run in OpenClaw by cost, with real-world estimates for typical coding tasks.

Complete Model Pricing Table

All prices are per 1 million tokens via NovAI, compared to direct pricing from OpenAI/Anthropic. Models ranked from cheapest to most expensive.

Models by Cost Tier

Best Model per Use Case

Different OpenClaw tasks have different requirements. Here’s our recommended model for each scenario:

Monthly Cost Calculator

Estimate your monthly OpenClaw costs based on how much you code. Drag the slider to match your daily usage:

Ready-to-Paste OpenClaw Configs

Copy any of these into ~/.openclaw/openclaw.json. All configs use the same NovAI API key.

Step 1: Get your free API key

Sign up at aiapi-pro.com (30 seconds, email only). Copy your API key and set it as an environment variable:

# Add to ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc
export NOVAI_API_KEY="your-key-here"

Step 2: Choose your config

// ~/.openclaw/openclaw.json
{
  "models": {
    "mode": "merge",
    "providers": {
      "novai": {
        "baseUrl": "https://aiapi-pro.com/v1",
        "apiKey": "${NOVAI_API_KEY:-}",
        "api": "openai-completions",
        "models": [
          {
            "id": "deepseek-v3.2",
            "name": "DeepSeek V3.2 (via NovAI)",
            "reasoning": false,
            "input": ["text"],
            "cost": {"input": 0.0000002, "output": 0.0000004},
            "contextWindow": 128000,
            "maxTokens": 8192
          },
          {
            "id": "glm-4.6v-flash",
            "name": "GLM Flash FREE (via NovAI)",
            "cost": {"input": 0, "output": 0},
            "contextWindow": 128000,
            "maxTokens": 4096
          }
        ]
      }
    }
  }
}

// ~/.openclaw/openclaw.json — Full Model Access
{
  "models": {
    "mode": "merge",
    "providers": {
      "novai": {
        "baseUrl": "https://aiapi-pro.com/v1",
        "apiKey": "${NOVAI_API_KEY:-}",
        "api": "openai-completions",
        "models": [
          {
            "id": "deepseek-v3.2",
            "name": "DeepSeek V3.2 [$0.20/$0.40]",
            "reasoning": false,
            "input": ["text"],
            "cost": {"input": 0.0000002, "output": 0.0000004},
            "contextWindow": 128000,
            "maxTokens": 8192
          },
          {
            "id": "qwen-turbo",
            "name": "Qwen Turbo [$0.06/$0.20]",
            "cost": {"input": 0.00000006, "output": 0.0000002},
            "contextWindow": 128000,
            "maxTokens": 8192
          },
          {
            "id": "qwen-plus",
            "name": "Qwen Plus [$0.30/$0.30]",
            "cost": {"input": 0.0000003, "output": 0.0000003},
            "contextWindow": 128000,
            "maxTokens": 8192
          },
          {
            "id": "qwen-max",
            "name": "Qwen Max [$0.40/$1.20]",
            "cost": {"input": 0.0000004, "output": 0.0000012},
            "contextWindow": 32000,
            "maxTokens": 8192
          },
          {
            "id": "glm-4-plus",
            "name": "GLM-4-Plus [$0.30/$0.30]",
            "cost": {"input": 0.0000003, "output": 0.0000003},
            "contextWindow": 128000,
            "maxTokens": 8192
          },
          {
            "id": "glm-4.6v-flash",
            "name": "GLM Flash [FREE]",
            "cost": {"input": 0, "output": 0},
            "contextWindow": 128000,
            "maxTokens": 4096
          },
          {
            "id": "minimax-text-01",
            "name": "MiniMax 1M [$0.20/$1.60]",
            "cost": {"input": 0.0000002, "output": 0.0000016},
            "contextWindow": 1000000,
            "maxTokens": 8192
          }
        ]
      }
    }
  }
}

The Smart Approach: Multi-Model Routing

The cheapest way to run OpenClaw isn’t picking one model — it’s using the right model for the right task. Here’s how experienced developers optimize their costs:

Example Monthly Budget

Here’s what a typical full-time developer’s month looks like with multi-model routing:

That’s a 96% cost reduction with no meaningful quality decrease for day-to-day coding tasks.

Frequently Asked Questions