Peter Steinberger’s $1.3 M Monthly Token Bill: OpenAI’s Subsidy Powers a 100‑Agent OpenClaw

Usage Statistics

In the last 30 days the OpenAI API bill was $1,305,088, consuming 603 billion tokens across 7.6 million requests. The most used model was GPT‑5.5. OpenAI covered the cost.

System Architecture

The team runs about 100 Codex agents in the cloud after OpenAI acquisition, with a three‑person core team. Instead of a single “super‑agent”, the workload is split among many small agents. Agents automatically review pull requests, scan for security vulnerabilities, detect duplicate issues, generate fixes, monitor benchmark regressions, and can listen to meetings to create PRs. Some agents perform tasks while others supervise the work of peers, forming a collaborative multi‑agent pipeline.

Daily request volume is 206 k, roughly 2.4 calls per second, indicating continuous operation.

Long‑running agents can suffer from context bloat, memory growth, and interference between agents.

Cost Trade‑offs

The $1.3 M monthly cost results from running the system in “fast mode”, which aggressively schedules inference and drives token consumption. Disabling fast mode reduces token usage by about 70 %, lowering the monthly bill to roughly $400 k (≈ 2.7 million RMB), still representing a substantial expense.

Compared with a senior engineer’s annual salary of several hundred thousand dollars, the AI‑driven approach is positioned as cost‑effective for repetitive engineering tasks.

Open‑source Positioning

All products built by the team are open‑source and compatible with both mainstream and open‑source models, which the team describes as delivering a high return on investment.

Future Outlook

A prior comment from “Ultraman” suggested that the future will be an “extremely multi‑agent” world; the current system exemplifies that direction. The author suggests software development is shifting from humans using tools to humans managing teams of AI agents.

Code example

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