Why The OpenClaw Founder Spent $1.3M on AI Tokens
Marketing School - Digital Marketing and Online Marketing Tips
Eric Siu and Neil Patel
4.6 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 26 May 2026
⏱️ 13 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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| 0:00.0 | When a buyer asks AI for a solution like yours, does your business come up? |
| 0:04.5 | Most companies have no idea. |
| 0:06.2 | And by the time they find out, they've already lost the deal to someone who did. |
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| 0:14.7 | for. |
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| 0:18.6 | That's the moment HubSpot AEO is built for. Check out Hubspot.com, the agenetic customer platform for growing businesses. OpenClaas founder, okay, Peter Steinberger, he spent $1.3 million on tokens in the span of 30 days, right? So he's like, people are freaking out over my token spends, but here's what nobody sees. So people are like, they're freaking out about it at the 1.3 million. |
| 0:38.7 | It's like, how do you justify it? |
| 0:39.7 | Right? So he's actually justifying it here. |
| 0:41.3 | And I think it's helpful for people to understand what the perceived ROI might be. So here's what he says. He says, here's what nobody sees. Part of what excites me so much about working on OpenClawn is that I'm trying to answer the question. |
| 0:52.1 | How would we build software in the future if tokens don't matter? |
| 0:55.5 | We constantly run 100 codex in the cloud reviewing every PR, every issue. |
| 0:59.3 | If a fix on mainland, Claw sweeper will eventually find that six-month-old issue and close it |
| 1:04.3 | with an exact reference. So he's just seeing all these things. Okay, security issues, right, |
| 1:08.2 | deduplicating things, complex theft, ephemeral like machines, log into telegram. So basically, he's trying to, I guess he's just saying that he's improving this quickly at scale and he's saying that all this automation allows us to run this project extremely lean, which is interesting because there's a lot of people that actually use OpenClaw, but here's the thing. We'll just leave it at that for a moment because i want to say that hermes is starting to overtake open claw but um hermes has a much i would say they have a more significant team but open claw has been able to get by so far until now where he's been saying that hey they're actually building a team around this so it's interesting to see this because it's like oh this is open source how source. How is it's only one person doing it? But the reality now is like what's covering for it is actually |
| 1:49.0 | that token spend. That token spend is actually what you would have spent on maybe payroll in the |
| 1:52.6 | past. Yeah. What do they spend the $1.3 million on or what are this all this stuff over here, |
| 1:58.0 | all this all this automation to help with just maintaining. |
| 2:01.5 | But like what was the end result? Like what did you what did he get at the end of? I think his |
| 2:06.7 | point is is saying that the 1.3 that I'm spending a month on this keeps open cloth stable with a very |
| 2:12.6 | lean team. Got it. Yeah. So it's more so maintenance. Yes. So maintenance security issues and a lot of tests that they need to run. That's all he's saying over here. Scans for comments for spam and then blocking issues, things like that. So instead of paying 1.3 to people, it's tokens. The tokens may or may not be cheaper than humans. So $12 million in payroll and like how many people are using OpenClaw right now. right now. I'm actually curious to see, so let me let me see. Yeah, I have no idea how many people are using it. Although I do think |
| 2:38.1 | over- $1 million in payroll and like how many people are using OpenClaught right now. I'm actually curious to see. So let me let me see. I have no idea how many people are using it. Although I do think OpenClawn's growth has slowed down because of Clot. Hermes is kicking its butt now. Yeah. So I know you could say Claude too. And I think a lot of them are building these solutions, but Hermes is the one that's really eating their lunch. |
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