AI Agent Costs in 2026: The Real Numbers Nobody Talks About

The hidden cost of “free” AI agents

OpenClaw is free software. It says so right on the repo: MIT license, 157,000 GitHub stars, zero dollars to download. This is technically true and practically misleading.

The software is free. Running it is not. OpenClaw requires an API key from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, or another LLM provider. Every task the agent performs – drafting an email, browsing the web, running a script, analyzing a document – consumes tokens billed to your account. There are no built-in cost controls. No spending caps. No warnings.

The result, documented across Reddit threads and user reports: casual users spending $5-20 per month in API fees. Power users hitting $50-100. And at the extreme end, Federico Viticci documented burning through 180 million tokens at a rate of $3,600 per month.

That is not a typo. Three thousand six hundred dollars a month for a “free” tool.

The problem is not the pricing model itself. Pay-per-use can work. The problem is that OpenClaw gives users no visibility into what they are spending until the bill arrives. Browser automation is especially brutal – a single web research task can trigger hundreds of API calls as the agent navigates, reads, clicks, and retries across pages. Each page load, each element inspection, each retry loop burns tokens.

The subscription stack problem

OpenClaw costs are only half the picture. Most AI-literate professionals are also paying for access to the models themselves.

The typical stack looks like this: ChatGPT Plus at $20 per month. Claude Pro at $20 per month. Gemini at $20 per month. Cursor at $20 per month for AI-assisted coding. That is $80 per month minimum before you have run a single autonomous agent task.

Research shows that most professionals are overpaying for overlapping AI subscriptions – stacking $20/month fees from multiple providers for capabilities that largely overlap. Subscription fatigue is real, and the waste is measurable.

This is the subscription stack problem. You are paying four companies $20 each for overlapping capabilities because no single product gives you access to all the models you need. If you also want autonomous agent capabilities, add OpenClaw’s unpredictable API costs on top.

Cost breakdown by use case

Not every user spends the same. Here is what the data shows across three tiers of usage:

Casual users ($5-20/month): You ask your agent a few questions a day, draft some emails, summarize documents. At this level, OpenClaw’s API costs are manageable. But you are still paying $20-60 in separate ChatGPT/Claude subscriptions on top. Total real cost: $25-80 per month for what feels like light usage.

Power users ($50-100/month): You run daily agent workflows – code review, data analysis, automated research. API costs climb because each workflow involves multi-step reasoning, tool use, and often browser automation. Combined with your subscription stack, you are looking at $130-180 per month.

Heavy users ($200-750+/month): You run agents continuously. Browser automation. Large codebase analysis. Monitoring tasks. Automated reporting. This is where costs become genuinely unpredictable. One extended browser automation session can consume more tokens than a week of chat-based usage. At this tier, you are spending more on AI tooling than some people spend on rent.

Browser automation: the silent token killer

Browser automation deserves its own callout because it is the single biggest driver of OpenClaw cost spikes.

When OpenClaw performs a web task – research, form filling, data extraction – it does not simply fetch a page and read it. It launches a browser, navigates to the URL, waits for rendering, inspects the DOM, extracts content, decides what to click, clicks it, waits again, reads the new page, and repeats. Each of these steps requires an API call to the underlying LLM. A complex task can involve dozens of pages and hundreds of individual API calls.

The per-call cost is small. A few cents per request. But compounded across a multi-page research task running every day, those cents become hundreds of dollars per month. Users rarely see this coming because the individual costs are invisible until the monthly invoice arrives.

The LikeClaw approach to pricing

We built LikeClaw’s pricing model around a simple principle: you should know what you are going to pay before you pay it.

Every plan has a fixed monthly price and hard usage caps:

• Free: $0/month. 50 tasks, basic models, 1 workspace. No credit card.
• Pro: $15-20/month. Unlimited chat, 500 sandbox executions, all models, 5 workspaces.
• Power: $40/month. Unlimited everything, BYOK support, priority execution.
• Team: $25/seat/month. Power features plus team management and SSO.

There are no overage charges. When you hit your cap, tasks queue – they do not silently bill you extra. You choose your ceiling in advance.

For users who want to bring their own API keys, the Power plan supports BYOK at zero markup. You pay the API provider directly at their standard rates, and LikeClaw charges only the platform fee. This gives heavy users the cost control they cannot get with OpenClaw (where there is no platform cost but also no cost guardrails) while still providing sandboxed execution, a vetted skills marketplace, and persistent workspaces.

The comparison with OpenClaw is stark. A heavy OpenClaw user spending $750 per month on API fees alone could run the same workloads on LikeClaw Power for $40 per month plus their direct API costs – with the added benefit of E2B sandboxed execution, usage dashboards, and hard spending limits. For a deeper feature-by-feature breakdown, see our full comparison of LikeClaw vs OpenClaw.

What this means in practice

AI agents are moving from experiment to infrastructure. The market is growing rapidly, and enterprise adoption is accelerating.

And like all infrastructure, cost predictability matters. You would not sign up for a cloud hosting provider that could not tell you what your monthly bill would be. You would not adopt a SaaS tool with no pricing page and a note that says “it depends on how much you use it.”

Yet that is exactly what OpenClaw asks you to accept. The software is free. The bill is a surprise.

The market is moving toward fixed-price tiers, usage caps, and BYOK options because users have learned – the hard way – that “free” and “cheap” are not the same thing. The real cost of an AI agent is not the download price. It is the total monthly spend required to actually use it.