After spending about $20/day with Anthropic, I spent the weekend researching every AI model people are running on OpenClaw: the open-source AI agent platform that just hit 188K GitHub stars and is now part of OpenAI! IIf you’re one of thousands of people who set up OpenClaw recently (or you’re thinking about it), the first question you hit is: which model should I actually use?
The answer isn’t one model. It’s a routing strategy. Here’s what I (and my AI agents) found after digging through GitHub discussions, Discord community, pricing pages, and real user cost reports:
- Claude Opus 4.6 is @steipete #1 recommendation: best tool-calling and prompt injection resistance but at $15/$75 per million tokens, most people burn through credits in minutes.
- Claude Sonnet 4.5 delivers 80-90% of Opus quality at 1/5 the cost. The community calls it the sweet spot.
- Gemini 2.5 Flash is incredibly cheap ($0.15/$0.60) with a massive 1M token context window, perfect for background tasks, but weaker on the complex reasoning your agent actually needs.
- DeepSeek V3 is the budget king at $0.27/$1.10, but struggles with multi-step tool chains.
The real insight: don’t use one model for everything. Use multi-model routing, a strong model (Sonnet) for active tasks, a cheap one (Flash) for heartbeats and background work, and a reasoning model (DeepSeek R1) for sub-agents.
This simple config change can cut your costs 50-80% while improving reliability.
I built a full comparison grid with 12 models, pricing, tool-calling ratings, community notes, and a recommended config. Free to download and share: