Track API Costs with the Token Economy Dashboard

Running an autonomous agent 24/7 sounds powerful until you check your API billing statement. OpenClaw provides unparalleled capabilities, but if an agent decides it needs to read and rewrite a massive codebase multiple times, your API token costs can quickly spiral out of control.

The Token Economy panel in ClawBridge is your financial safeguard. It provides a real-time, granular breakdown of exactly where your money is going, empowering you to keep your AI budget strictly under control.

The Cost Trap: Why Agents Are Expensive

LLMs (Large Language Models) charge per token—both for the context they read (Input) and the text they generate (Output). Autonomous agents are particularly token-hungry because they operate in loops:

1. They read the current state of a file.
2. They generate a plan.
3. They output a tool call to modify the file.
4. They read the file again to verify.

If an agent gets stuck in an infinite loop while analyzing a 5,000-line file with a premium model like GPT-4 or Claude Opus, you could burn through $10 in an hour without realizing it.

The Token Economy Dashboard

ClawBridge solves this by hooking into the token usage logs of OpenClaw and visualizing them on your mobile dashboard.

Real-Time Financial Awareness

• Today's Cost Overview: Front and center on your dashboard, see exactly what you've spent today in USD.
• Estimated Monthly Burn Rate: A projected calculation based on current trends. If your agent is running unusually hot, the monthly projection spikes immediately, prompting you to investigate.
• Input vs. Output Tokens: Understand your ratio. If output tokens are massively disproportionate to input, your agent might be aggressively writing or rewriting unnecessary files.

Model Cost Breakdown

Different tasks require different levels of intelligence. Your agent might use Gemini Pro for cheap, fast parsing and Claude Opus for complex reasoning. The Token Economy dashboard itemizes costs by model:

• Gemini Pro: $0.28 (150k tokens)
• GPT-4o: $1.20 (40k tokens)
• Claude 3 Haiku: $0.05 (100k tokens)

By breaking this down, you can identify exactly which model is consuming your budget and optimize your agent's routing logic.

Keeping Your Budget Safe

1. Daily Audits

Instead of logging into OpenAI or Anthropic’s billing pages every morning, simply open ClawBridge on your phone. See exactly what your agent cost you while you were asleep.

2. Identifying Anomalies

The 7-Day Cost Trend graph makes it easy to spot a sudden jump. If your average cost is $0.50 a day and it suddenly jumps to $5.00, you know instantly you need to review the Live Thoughts feed to see what the agent has been struggling with.

3. ROI Analysis

When you launch a new cron job via Mission Control—such as a daily web scraper—you can immediately measure its token footprint against its actual value to your workflow.